• The objective is to multiply the performance in the manufacture of chip wafers through its own patented system with the most cutting-edge technology worldwide in the measurement of deformation of silicon wafers.

• Minister Óscar López highlighted this investment as key to “manufacturing the most efficient and fast equipment in the world in chip production” and thus accelerate the strategy of reindustrialization and technological sovereignty of Europe”.

La Laguna (Tenerife), January 9, 2025.- The Minister for Digital Transformation and Public Function, Óscar López, has announced in the Canary Islands the entry of SETT (Spanish Society for Technological Transformation) in the Spanish company WOOPTIX, with an initial public co-investment of 4 million euros. The commitment to this company of manufacture of equipment for the production of semiconductors seeks to multiply the capabilities of chip manufacturing and accelerate the reindustrialization of Spain and its technological sovereignty.

López has announced it from the facilities of the company itself, which emerged as a spin-off from the University of La Laguna in the Canary Islands, and which is constituted as a pioneer and unique company in Spain in semiconductor metrology, an essential technique for the control of the process of production of wafers that each time house smaller chips and require more efficient measurement systems.

The government aims to achieve a global competitive advantage with this investment in WOOPTIX, which has patented its own unique system of measurement and processing of the wafer, essential for the optimization of semiconductor manufacturing processes. Factories using Wooptix technology are able to perform the measurement of wafers by acquiring more than 16 million data points with sub-nanometer height resolution, which allows the topography of silicon wafers, essential for semiconductor processing, to be calibrated more accurately and faster than the competition.

This investment has recently been approved by the Governing Council of SETT, a public business entity attached to the Ministry for Digital Transformation and Public Function. SETT will co-invest more than 4 million euros in its solutions, accompanied by other strategic international actors that will raise the capital inflow into the company to more than 10 million euros.

The minister has celebrated the “success story” represented by Wooptix: “From the increase in the commitment to research and its transfer of knowledge from the University to the company, through the strategy of reindustrializing Spain towards the technological, to the territorial structuring of government investments aimed at the economic sectors of the future”.

In this regard, Óscar López stressed that “this project offers the possibility of incorporating important industrial capacities for the different Spanish semiconductor ecosystems. And it is especially important for the Canaries, increasing the technological fabric of the area and the generation of employment in the islands in a leading sector and of high added value”.

23.5 million for the connectivity of the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands.

The minister has also claimed the important public investments of the Government of Spain so that the Canary Islands have the most avant-garde connectivity capabilities in this new digital era. He did so during his visit to the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands, one of the world’s leading research and astrophysics centres, whose Roque de los Muchachos and Teide Observatories are in the top 3 in the world.

Among the different actions of the Government in this matter has referred to the investment of 23.5 million euros to install a high-performance optical network that guarantees the technological redundancy that these observatories require. This new optical network has been funded by the European Next Generation EU funds and has been used both for the installation of powerful submarine cables and for terrestrial cables to facilitate high performance connectivity permanently and autonomously to these observatories.

Óscar López celebrated that “with these information highways we will achieve a higher quality of the observation of the skies, and we will consolidate the Canary Islands as a great international pole for the attraction of new projects and jobs related to astrophysics”.