EV Group (EVG), a leading supplier of wafer bonding and lithography equipment for the MEMS, nanotechnology and semiconductor markets, today announced that it has begun construction on another extensive building project at its corporate headquarters in St. Florian am Inn, Austria.
EV Group Executive Board. From left to right: Dr. Werner Thallner, Erich Thallner, Aya Maria Thallner, Hermann Waltl and Paul Lindner.
With an investment of 30 million Euros, the new Cleanroom V building will create additional capacity for product and process development, equipment demonstrations for existing and potential customers, feasibility studies as well as prototyping and pilot production.
The comprehensive groundwork for the ultra-modern, new building was recently finished and includes footings that reach up to 14 meters deep into the ground. Once the new world-class cleanroom is completed, it will host highly developed precision equipment, such as EVG's lithography systems, wafer bonders and metrology systems, which operate with micro- and nanometer accuracies. The contaminant-free conditions of EVG's cleanrooms at its headquarters, as well as its subsidiaries in America and Asia, are comparable to those in the fabs of EVG's worldwide high-tech industry customers.
"Just this past April, EV Group celebrated the opening of our new Manufacturing III facility with our employees, which itself provides 1,800 square meters of additional production floor space for the final assembly of our equipment," stated Dr. Werner Thallner, executive operations and financial director at EV Group. "In the meantime, the construction crews already started to work at the other end of our campus on this new building, which will add even more capacity to support our business growth. With the investment in expanding our cleanroom capacity, we continue to demonstrate our local commitment to Austria, as well as our global commitment to our worldwide customers."
Markus Wimplinger, EVG's corporate technology development and IP director, added: "Our engineers develop and optimize wafer processes for our equipment to fulfill individual production requirements, often in close cooperation with our customers. This new building will open completely new opportunities to the EVG technology teams."
The new Cleanroom V building will provide approximately 620 square meters of additional cleanroom floor space -- nearly doubling the cleanroom capacity at EVG's headquarters. In total, the new building will encompass a floor space of about 4,400 square meters. The construction work is set to be completed by the middle of next year.
In the last 10 years alone, the investment volume at EVG's headquarters -- where worldwide development and production are centralized -- amounted to nearly 100 million Euros. During this period, EVG expanded its manufacturing capacity, machining center, cleanrooms and application labs in several stages and built a new R&D center and training center. Moreover, in addition to the new reception and office building with its continuous glass front, a large company restaurant as well as a day-care facility for EVG employees (unique in the wider area) were created.