"With the signing of this memorandum, TU/e and ASML seal their good cooperation of recent years, but we are going one step further," Smits said this morning in the University Club, where that memorandum was signed in the presence of a group of employees of ASML and TU/e deans and professors. With the latter, Smits referred to the planned construction by ASML of a research facility on the TU/e campus, in which a state-of-the-art cleanroom will also be set up. Cursor already reported on this at the beginning of this month.

That new facility will also feature shared workspaces, meeting rooms and research laboratories, and the university is now in the process of granting a long-term lease on campus for that purpose. Completion is scheduled for the end of 2025. Exactly where the facility will be built will be announced in the foreseeable future, according to Dorine Peters, director of Real Estate. At least in the immediate vicinity of the Flux building on the east side of the site.

Close cooperation

In this facility, ASML researchers will carry out their own research, but also research that takes place in close collaboration with scientists and PhD students from TU/e. TU/e will also rent part of the facility from ASML, where there will be room for other TU/e research that requires a cleanroom. Other research centres and industrial partners will also be able to go there. Smits: "So it will not be a compound within a compound, as you sometimes see elsewhere, but a place where joint research is also explicitly carried out. Good for our researchers, but certainly also for our students, who already come into contact with researchers from ASML during their studies, from which they can learn a lot." According to Smits, ASML employees will play a role as hybrid teachers and coaches.

The shared cleanroom space will enable growth and synergy between academic research areas of mutual interest, such as photonics, quantum, nanomaterials and chip manufacturing. The realization of the intended facility involves an estimated investment of several hundred million euros. The intention is that the new facility will accommodate more than five hundred researchers, including several hundred ASML employees.

The 10-year strategic roadmap that ASML and TU/e will develop together will focus on plasma physics, artificial intelligence, mechatronics and semiconductor lithography. Both parties will ‘invest substantially and equally’ in this, according to the press release. In this new program, up to forty PhD positions will be created each year, 'for which TU/e will recruit internationally renowned top scientific talents'.

Scale jump

After Smits, Jos Benschop, Corporate Vice President Technology at ASML, took the floor. "It's raining outside, but the sun is shining inside today," he said. "Our relationship with TU/e goes back to the early days of ASML. Our collaboration is based on a shared commitment to creating meaningful innovations for society, by bridging fundamental science and industrial engineering. This next step in our partnership shapes a brighter future for the Brainport region. Wonderful things will happen here and as ASML we feel very welcome on the TU/e campus."

Smits agreed and said he expected that the arrival of the new facility and the further cooperation will make a substantial contribution to the increase in scale that the Brainport region wants to make in the coming years, and the leap in scale that the university itself wants to make in order to meet the growing demand from the region for highly trained engineers. For the latter, financial support from The Hague is necessary and Smits said that he had a conversation about this with the cabinet in March, "but that has not yielded anything. We'll talk again in June and hopefully we'll get a better result."

On the main photo from left to right: Frank Schuurmans, Vice President Research at ASML, President of the Executive Board Robert-Jan Smits and Jos Benschop, Vice President Technology at ASML.