LITILIT, a startup specializing in the production of femtosecond lasers, is launching a project to build a mass-production, automated laser factory in Vilnius, with a total value of approximately six million euros. The company will set up the factory in leased premises on Plungės Street in the capital and will begin manufacturing femtosecond lasers next year. The startup plans to increase its annual production capacity to 3,000 lasers within a few years, according to the company’s press release.
The total area of the production facilities will be approximately 4,000 m². It will consist of a modern CNC metalworking shop and robotic assembly and testing shops for femtosecond lasers. According to Nikolai Gavrilin, one of the company’s founders and its CEO, the infrastructure has been designed from the outset with a focus on high automation and efficient mass production.
“Femtosecond lasers are already becoming an integral part of smart manufacturing, artificial intelligence, semiconductors, and other rapidly developing industries, and demand for them will grow even further in the future. The factory being built in Lithuania will be one of the largest in the world in terms of femtosecond laser production capacity and will serve as a model that we plan to replicate in other regions in collaboration with international partners,” says N. Gavrilinas.
Patented technology
According to N. Gavrilinas, the company will be able to carry out and rapidly expand mass production thanks to a fundamentally new and internationally patented method for generating ultrashort pulses, discovered in 2014 by one of the company’s founders, Kęstutis Regelskis, in collaboration with the Center for Physical and Technological Sciences (FTMC). Based on this, the company has developed its own laser technology direction, which it hopes to establish as the dominant technology for femtosecond laser manufacturing.
“A large portion of traditional femtosecond laser architectures have historically evolved from scientific systems: they feature high-performance parameters but are often complex to assemble, difficult to automate, and require a great deal of manual labor and highly qualified specialists. We use a different architecture, less complex components, a modular design, and a higher level of automation, which allows us to organize assembly, testing, and quality control more efficiently,” explains N. Gavrilinas.
Femtosecond lasers are characterized by enormous (500 MW) peak optical power and can precisely affect only the material onto which the light is focused, without affecting surrounding areas and without causing microcracks or other adverse effects.
Source: lrt.lt