36-Month OPTIMAL Project Meeting & Workshop at JOANNEUM RESEARCH, Weiz (2025)

The 36-month OPTIMAL Project meeting took place at JOANNEUM RESEARCH in Weiz, Austria, on 20–21 November 2025. Alongside the meeting, the OPTIMAL Project Workshop showcased the future of high-precision manufacturing.

It was an incredibly productive day at the Industrial Workshop for the Horizon Europe OPTIMAL Project. The consortium successfully validated the world’s first integrated Automated Maskless Laser Lithography Platform.

The OPTIMAL mission is clear: to enable the “First Time Right” principle in manufacturing industrial masters. The platform combines parallel and serial patterning to fabricate complex mixed-scale structures, from 100 nm to sub-mm features, with depths up to 150 µm, all in a single step.

This data-driven precision, demonstrated through detailed inspection of high-quality masters, is key to achieving over 40% reduction in resource consumption. This milestone marks a significant step toward sustainable European manufacturing.

Validation by our partners confirmed the platform’s relevance across multiple sectors, including next-generation optics (Sony, Hypervision) for automotive lighting and VR, hierarchical riblet structures (BASF) to enhance energy efficiency in aviation, and microfluidic chips (JOANNEUM RESEARCH) for lab-on-chip medical devices.

36-Month OPTIMAL Project Meeting & Workshop at JOANNEUM RESEARCH, Weiz (2025)

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