Description: The young optoelectronic industry has critical mass and already impacts for more than the 10% on the European economy, employing 290 000 people and guarantees a stable double digit growth in current and coming years. Europe is playing a leading role in R&D (>1,000 research organization active) and is still able to face Far East and American competitors in manufacturing. white’R is a necessary action to translate this R&D excellence into future leadership in manufacturing high value added optoelectronic devices. white’R production island aims to make a move away from the manual assembly processes that have characterized the industry for decades to high-accuracy, high-yield, automated methods.
The new manufacturing concept is based on the combination of fully automated, self contained, “white room” modules whose components – robots, end effectors, transport, handling and tooling systems – are conceived as “Plug&Produce” mechatronic sub-modules properly configured coherently with the production requirements. The technical objectives of white’R system are: 50% reduction of cost compared to current productions system; 30% set-up and ramp-up time reduction by self adaptive reconfigurability; All components of the production system reusable re-assembled and upgraded in a new different system; Creation of a EU/International standard for optoelectronic package configuration.