In March 2019, a new facility that aims to build state-of-the-art detectors for research laboratories like CERN in Switzerland, BNL in the US, the next generation of colliders (80km Circular Collider in China), and for industrial applications, started operating at NTU.

The facility provides robotic gantry instruments with vision capability, as well as programmable wire bonding services. It has been assigned by the CMS experiment at CERN to produce 5000 sensor modules for the next generation of particle imaging calorimeter detectors (such detectors discovered the Higgs boson at CERN in 2012). NTU students and researchers currently work together with students and scientists from the rest of the collaborating institutes to produce the first prototype detectors with components fully made in Taiwan.

Prof. Stathes Paganis, the initiator of the programme, mentioned: it is unprecedented for Taiwan to build the heart of the detectors for some of the finest experiments in the world, and do that here in Taiwan. We now have the opportunity to develop novel devices in Taiwan making use of excellent local companies, retain local expertise and even produce detectors for industrial and medical applications.