Hamamatsu City, Japan -- Hamamatsu Photonics will construct a new factory building at its Miyakoda Factory site located in Shinmiyakoda, Kita-ku, Hamamatsu City, Japan. This new manufacturing space will increase the production capacity to respond to expanded market needs for semiconductor lasers essential in LiDAR* applications.

Right: Artist's impression of the new factory building. (Hamamatsu Photonics).

The groundbreaking ceremony for the new factory building is scheduled to be held on May 10, 2023, and the new factory building will be completed in July 2024.

* LiDAR is an abbreviation for “light detection and ranging” and is a remote sensing technology to measure the distance to an object by irradiating a laser beam onto it and detecting the reflected light with an optical sensor.

Hamamatsu Photonics has been developing, manufacturing and selling semiconductor lasers and laser oscillators used in a wide range of fields including measurement, analysis, laser processing, factory automation and medical applications. This includes optoelectronic devices requiring a broad range of laser types.

Today, sensing technologies using light are utilized in a vast range of diverse applications. Among these technologies, LiDAR, which uses semiconductor lasers for contact-free and high-precision measurement of the position and shape of objects over long distances, is currently applied to autonomous driving. They are also present in many other applications including public transportation infrastructure, automated transport, and autonomous mobile robots. This means that a vast expansion in the LiDAR product market can be expected in the future.

Hamamatsu Photonics will now build a brand new factory on the Miyakoda Factory site to consolidate post-processing steps (after wafer process) in semiconductor laser manufacture. Currently these are dispersed to different locations in the factory site. The construction of the new factory building will expand production space to meet an ever- increasing product demand.

This newest factory building will allow us to optimize workflow lines between production processes and also install the latest in manufacturing and inspection equipment. This will promote process automation and efficiency and thereby improve productivity. The factory has an earthquake-resistant design to make it much more disaster resilient and proactively incorporates eco-friendly measures such as heat- insulating structures and solar power generation systems.

We are one of the very few companies in the world that manufactures both photodetectors and light sources. This gives us the advantage of being able to propose an optimum set of photodetectors and light sources that are specifically designed, developed and manufactured to match each application. Taking this advantage, we aim to expand sales of semiconductor lasers, including those for LiDAR.