Lithuanian laser specialist LITILIT has secured €8 million in financing to develop a high-power modular femtosecond laser system, technology that could ultimately find applications across advanced manufacturing, aerospace and defence supply chains.
Lithuania’s national development bank, ILTE, will cover most of the € 10 million bill with an €8 million loan. LITILIT will put in the remaining €2 million as it works towards a FEMODA system capable of reaching 1,000W of average optical power.
Development began in 2024, with commercialisation targeted for the second half of 2029.
Rather than concentrating its output into a single beam, FEMODA is being designed to distribute power across between 10 and 20 independent channels. Each could deliver femtosecond pulses to a separate processing point, potentially allowing manufacturers to use the technology across larger components or multiple production stages simultaneously.
Femtosecond lasers deliver extremely short pulses that can remove or modify material while minimising heat transfer into the surrounding structure. That precision has already made them useful in semiconductor, electronics, and medical manufacturing, but LITILIT believes their industrial footprint can expand considerably.
The company is targeting applications including mass production of metal tools and specialist coatings across large surfaces such as aircraft and vehicle bodies. Those capabilities also have an obvious relevance to defence manufacturing, where greater production capacity, precision processing and the ability to work with advanced materials are increasingly important.
A key part of the project is therefore less about raw power than making the technology easier to deploy on factory floors.
Existing high-power femtosecond systems can require water-cooling infrastructure, heavy optical equipment and tightly controlled operating environments. LITILIT says FEMODA will instead integrate control electronics, optics and cooling into individual industrial modules, designed to tolerate greater variation in temperature, humidity and vibration.
The modular approach could also improve resilience. Individual units can be combined to increase system power, while a failed module could be replaced without taking out the entire system.
FEMODA forms part of a wider push by LITILIT to industrialise femtosecond laser production. The company began developing a new factory in Vilnius in June, which is due to begin operating this autumn and is targeting annual capacity of 3,000 lasers.
If LITILIT can translate that scalability from individual lasers to high-power modular systems, femtosecond technology could move from a specialist manufacturing tool towards a more practical part of high-volume industrial production.
