PI Ceramic expands piezo transducer production with $11M investment
Ground has been broken for a new 81,000 square foot production facility addition at PI Ceramic’s location at Lederhose, Germany. PI Ceramic (PIC), a subsidiary of global precision motion and piezo technology solutions company PI (Physik Instrumente; Auburn, MA), announced the $11 million dollar investment to enlarge its current facilities in Lederhose, Germany by more than 50%.
The future building will offer three floors for multilayer piezo ceramic assembly production in addition to general office space, a significant increase to its existing 129,000 square foot structure. PI Ceramic specializes in high quality standard and customized piezo transducers for applications including medical, aerospace, and robotics. PIC’s patented ceramic-insulated multilayer PZT actuators are used on the Mars Rover Curiosity after passing a 100 billion cycle stress test by JPL/NASA. PI Ceramic currently employs about 330 people (about one quarter of the PI Group). The anticipated move-in time is planned for mid-2020.
Managing director Patrick Pertsch said, "This building is an expression of our joint success here at PI Ceramic. I am excited for us to fill it with ideas, sophisticated piezoceramic products, and most of all, solutions that meet the demands of our customers.”
PI manufactures air bearing stages, piezoelectric solutions, precision motion control equipment, and hexapod parallel-kinematics for semiconductor applications, photonics, bio-nano-technology and medical engineering. The PI group employs more than 1300 people worldwide in 15 subsidiaries and R&D/engineering centers on three continents.
SOURCE: PI Ceramic; https://www.piceramic.com/en/news-events/news/
About the Author
Gail Overton
Senior Editor (2004-2020)
Gail has more than 30 years of engineering, marketing, product management, and editorial experience in the photonics and optical communications industry. Before joining the staff at Laser Focus World in 2004, she held many product management and product marketing roles in the fiber-optics industry, most notably at Hughes (El Segundo, CA), GTE Labs (Waltham, MA), Corning (Corning, NY), Photon Kinetics (Beaverton, OR), and Newport Corporation (Irvine, CA). During her marketing career, Gail published articles in WDM Solutions and Sensors magazine and traveled internationally to conduct product and sales training. Gail received her BS degree in physics, with an emphasis in optics, from San Diego State University in San Diego, CA in May 1986.