AET Group will consolidate its activities on a single site by 2022 to accelerate its development

Tailor-made and technical

For almost fifty years, the AET Group has been putting its industrial know-how at the service of prestigious clients in order to respond to the problems they encounter. “We design customised industrial furnaces from A to Z. Generally, people turn to us when they have exhausted all existing solutions.

These are products that we develop for a specific request, so only once and for a single customer, whether it is to test materials before a full-scale production process, or to test materials in a severe atmosphere to simulate extreme temperatures or negative pressure, etc.

The added value of the AET Group lies in its perfect mastery of homogeneous temperature rise, management of negative atmospheres (to depollute the air or simulate the vacuum of space) and regulation and control systems. “We can produce furnaces that rise from 100° per second to 2000°, maintain the temperature and bring it down very quickly, and measure it to the nearest millisecond, with a gradient not exceeding 1.5°. Two thirds of its customers are R&TD centres, such as the CEA, the CNRS and industrialists such as STMicroelectronics and Arcelor, among others.

A unique oxidation technology for LiDARs

While AET Group is a major departure from specialist industrial furnace manufacturers, its subsidiary Aloxtec goes even further. “We design oxidation furnaces for one of the most important technology bricks – the VCSEL (for vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser) involved in the design of remote sensing and laser LiDARs.”

In concrete terms, Aloxtec’s technology will be used in one of the dozen or so stages of the VCSEL’s development. “We will oxidise an intermediate layer in our furnace and we will measure the level of oxidation to the nearest micron to stop it at the second. If we oxidise too much, we block the hole where the laser beam passes through, and if it’s not enough, we lose precision.

In this market, which is particularly buoyant in view of the industrial recovery, especially in electronics in the broad sense, Aloxtec has a considerable lead with its technological brick, which has a 60% to 70% share of the world market in its sector. In order to meet the growing demand, the AET Group subsidiary plans to recruit engineers and project managers on a massive scale, mainly in the next four to five years.