Riber recorded first-half revenue of €12.8 million as rapid growth in services and accessories supported continued industrial development of its ROSIE oxide epitaxy platform.
Revenue increased by 19% from €10.7 million during the comparable period. Molecular beam epitaxy system sales remained broadly stable at €7.7 million, with three production machines delivered in each period, while services and accessories rose by 71% to €5.1 million.
The service business includes spare parts, equipment upgrades, maintenance, process support, and products required to keep installed epitaxy systems operating. Compared with complete machine sales, which can vary according to customer investment schedules, these activities provide a more recurring revenue stream.
Riber’s equipment deposits extremely thin crystalline layers under high vacuum, controlling material composition and thickness at atomic scale. Manufacturers can use those layers to create semiconductor structures with electronic and optical properties unavailable from the underlying wafer alone.
Applications extend across photonics, radiofrequency devices, advanced sensors, research, and quantum technology. Production quality depends on temperature uniformity, vacuum performance, material-source stability, deposition control, and the repeatability of the layer structure across each wafer and successive manufacturing runs.
ROSIE has been developed for the growth of functional oxide materials on 300mm silicon wafers and is designed around semiconductor manufacturing standards. Riber intends the system to provide a route for integrating new optical and electronic functions with established silicon processes.
A second ROSIE system was scheduled for shipment in July to a United States customer working in quantum computing. The company is also developing a dual-chamber production configuration intended to offer greater process flexibility, separation between materials, and higher throughput.
Potential applications include electro-optic components for telecommunications and data centres, where electrical signals must be converted into light and manipulated at high speed. Functional oxides can provide useful properties for modulation, switching, sensing, and control within photonic circuits.
New materials move towards silicon production
Demand for optical communications is increasing as artificial intelligence infrastructure places greater pressure on data-centre networks. Growth in compound semiconductor photonics is being driven by lasers, detectors, and associated devices used to move data between computing systems.
Electrical interconnects become harder to operate efficiently as data rates, density, and transmission distances rise. Optical links reduce some constraints involving loss and interference, although they require a manufacturing chain spanning epitaxial materials, device fabrication, drivers, packaging, fibre attachment, testing, and thermal management.
Integrating photonic functions with 300mm silicon could allow manufacturers to use larger-scale wafer infrastructure and place optical components closer to electronic circuits. Many useful optical materials, however, have different crystal structures, thermal behaviour, and process requirements from silicon.
Oxide epitaxy provides one route towards that integration, but commercial adoption will depend on defect control, wafer uniformity, repeatability, and compatibility with later fabrication stages. A material performing well on a small research sample must demonstrate stable properties across an entire production wafer.
Equipment manufacturers influence how quickly such materials leave the laboratory because universities may identify a promising structure while industrial users require machinery capable of reproducing it safely, reliably, and at a commercially useful throughput.
Riber’s installed base gives its service division strategic value beyond immediate revenue. Regular contact with operating systems provides information about component life, process stability, user requirements, and potential upgrades, which can feed into the engineering of subsequent equipment generations.
With Asia representing the company’s largest regional market during the first half, export licensing and restrictions on advanced semiconductor equipment continue to affect order cycles. Systems and processes linked to strategic or dual-use applications may require additional approval before shipment.
Longer licensing procedures can delay revenue and limit access to some customers, while increasing the importance of approved markets in Europe, North America, and elsewhere. They may also influence where research organisations and manufacturers decide to develop future capability.
ROSIE remains at an earlier industrial stage than Riber’s established molecular beam epitaxy product lines, and customer installations will provide evidence of how the platform performs outside the company’s own development environment.
The service operation gives Riber a stronger base while its next platform moves through qualification. Longer-term growth will depend on functional oxide integration becoming a repeatable manufacturing requirement across photonics and quantum systems rather than remaining confined to specialist research and pilot production.
