GLOUCESTERSHIRE, UK — Renishaw recently marked a major milestone in its growth with the opening of its new 153,000 square foot Innovation Center in the U.K.

The $31 million facility, located at company headquarters near Wotton-under-Edge, Gloucestershire, was formally opened in early July.

The Renishaw Innovation Center gives the company additional space to house research and development and corporate services staff, as well as demonstration, training and conference facilities. The additional space also enables Renishaw's spectroscopy and laser calibration product lines to relocate to the company headquarters site. This first phase of the development includes planning permission to expand by another 77,000 square feet.

The company's investment program also includes the opening of a new R&D operation within the faculty of electrical engineering at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, as well as other new construction in the UK.

At the opening event for the Innovation Center, David McMurtry, Renishaw’s chairman and chief executive, said: “This is one of a series of significant investments that we are making to secure our growth in the UK and our many overseas markets. This building on its own represents a £20 million investment ($31 million) and I would like to thank all of the Renishaw employees and our contractors who have worked incredibly hard to deliver such a high quality facility.”

As part of the celebration for the new Innovation Center, HRH, The Princess Royal, presented the company with its 18th Queen's Award, this one for Enterprise in the Innovation category. The then Princess Anne last visited Renishaw in 1980 when the company had just one facility and employed around 100 people, a vast difference from today when the business has more than 4,000 employees in the UK and at wholly owned subsidiary operations in 31 countries.

Inside the Renishaw Innovation Centre, all 40 meeting rooms are named after British innovators, primarily in the fields of science and engineering, but also innovators local to Renishaw’s headquarters site, such as Tyndale, Jenner and Pitman. The main conferencing facility is named after UK engineering icon Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who was responsible for many well known structures in the West of England region including the Clifton Suspension Bridge and the ss Great Britain. Other rooms are dedicated to significant innovators including Whittle, Faraday, Lovelace, Haslett, Babbage, Turing, Caxton and Stephenson. “This excellent new building is a place we hope will inspire people, and while it is very much focused on the future, we are also keen to honor those British innovators who have helped us as a society get to where we are today,” said McMurtry.

Queen’s Award for Enterprise

Renishaw received its Queen’s Award for the development and manufacture of its RESOLUTE family of non-contact, optical position feedback devices. RESOLUTE enables a leap in performance for motion control systems used in manufacturing and other environments. Suitable for the most demanding applications, RESOLUTE is the world’s first single track fine-pitch optical absolute encoder. It can determine position to a resolution of one nanometer (one billionth of a meter) with motion speeds of up to 100 meters per second for linear position applications, and is capable of 32-bit resolution at up to 36,000 RPM for rotary (angle) applications. RESOLUTE is used in diverse applications, such as safety-critical position feedback for medical robots, the control of precision metalworking machines, the manufacture of flat panel displays and the production of semiconductors.

“RESOLUTE is a phenomenal product that marries our years of experience and expertise in areas such as optics, high speed image processing, system engineering and precision manufacturing," said David McMurtry. "I am proud of the achievements of the many people across the Renishaw Group who have worked tirelessly to produce a globally successful encoder product that is a world-first in its field.”

New Slovenian research facility opened in June

Renishaw Tehni?ni Inženiring d.o.o. a new R&D operation within the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, was opened in June. It will design, develop and supply integrated circuits and sensor technologies for the Renishaw Group and RLS merilna tehnika d.o.o., a Slovenian associate of Renishaw that designs and manufactures advanced rotary and linear motion sensors.

"For more than a decade, the University of Ljubljana's Laboratory of Microelectronics (LMFE) has been a key supplier of ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits) to the Renishaw Group, and this new investment reflects our confidence in the continuing value of that relationship,” said McMurtry.??

For more information, visit www.renishaw.com.