FiconTEC Establishes US Subsidiary Based at CREOL

Photonics assembly and test company ficonTEC Service GmbH has established ficonTEC Inc. as a wholly owned subsidiary. The Aachen, Germany-based parent company opened a joint facility — its U.S. operations center — with the University of Central Florida (UCF), located at UCF CREOL, the College of Optics and Photonics, in Orlando, Fla.

The subsidiary comprises the company’s U.S. team, which will be based at the facility and led by Stefano Concezzi, who has been named CEO of ficonTEC Inc.

According to ficonTEC CEO Torsten Vahrenkamp, the facility supports ficonTEC’s growth in areas such as integrated photonics and sensors and detectors.

“North America in particular is proving pivotal in leading greater adoption of integrated photonics for communications, data centers, and 5G, for sensors and automotive lidar, and for consumer 3D sensing, so we needed a dedicated expansion of the regional sales and service operations,” Vahrenkamp said. “With recruitment already initiated for 2021 and training completed at ficonTEC [headquarters] in Germany, we now have a growing team of field service and application development engineers ready to get the job done.”

FiconTEC joins UCF CREOL as a client within the CREOL Photonics Incubator, part of the UCF Business Incubation Program. Companies in the Photonics Incubator have access to the CREOL faculty, graduate students, and CREOL laboratory facilities including cleanrooms and a Leica 5000 e-beam lithography instrument, as well as UCF resources including the staff of the Office of Research and Commercialization and the Venture Lab.

David Hagan (left), Pegasus Professor and dean at CREOL, and Torsten Vahrenkamp, ficonTEC CEO. The company has established a U.S.-based subsidiary located at UCF at its College of Optics and Photonics. Courtesy of ficonTEC.

The ficonTEC/UCF CREOL joint facility will also include a new regional ficonTEC Applications Lab, which will support integrated photonics assembly and test development in the North American market.

David Hagan, UCF CREOL dean and Pegasus Professor at UCF, said, “The benefits in partnering with ficonTEC became quickly clear. It brings a new dimension to CREOL’s established photonics R&D groups, to the Florida Photonics Cluster, and to the broader U.S. photonics industry. Equally importantly, it will provide UCF students with an unmatched opportunity to learn the techniques of photonics integration. And by also providing regional support for process engineering for industry with the new Apps Lab, we anticipate many other new benefits and synergies, even funding opportunities.”

FiconTEC develops and manufactures assembly and test machine systems for the production of photonic components. Its intellectual property is founded on roughly 1000 operational production systems located globally, and in applications that include communications, smart mobility, sensors for IoT, sustainability, and clean energy. Applications include 3D facial recognition, mapping sensors in smartphones, and the lidar assembly that self-driving cars use to scan surroundings.

FiconTEC is the fourth company to join UCF’s Photonics Incubator within the CREOL facilities. The incubator is also home to LC Matter Corp., Plasmonics Inc., and Olkin Optics.