GT Solar Opens New State-of-the-Art Sapphire Manufacturing FacilityGT Solar announces the opening of our new sapphire production facility in Salem, Massachusetts. We’ve leveraged forty years of crystal growth expertise from Crystal Systems and combined it with GT’s successful track record of rapid scale-up of commercial crystalline growth technology to create a new state-of-the-art sapphire manufacturing facility capable of producing predictable and repeatable high quality sapphire crystal run after run. The opening of the new plant concludes an expansion project that began in the fall of 2010 that triples the sapphire production capacity in our Salem facility. GT invested $27 million to create a high volume production facility to provide sapphire material for the fast-growing LED market and other industrial material industries. The facility is a highly efficient manufacturing environment utilizing the latest production control technology to produce high-yielding boules of consistent size and quality. The boules produce cores of two, four, six or eight-inch and beyond for downstream processing into high quality wafers for the LED market and other material such as large diameter A and C-axis windows for aerospace and defense applications. The company’s crystal growth experts also use the manufacturing facility as a research and development center – testing advancements in process technology and commercializing process knowledge and know-how that deliver value to our growing list of ASF™ equipment customers.
