Héctor Gómez, Minister of Industry, Trade and Tourism, visited the University of La Laguna this morning, Friday, June 30th, where he was received by the Rector, Francisco García, and members of his team. The Rector's Office had prepared an agenda for the Minister, allowing him to explore five centuries of history in just two hours. His visit included the University of La Laguna's Rare Book Collection, with its incunabula and other priceless works, and the cleanroom where various prototypes are tested by Wooptix, a spin-off company partly owned by the university and dedicated to the latest trends in sub-nanometer imaging and lenses.
The visit began at the Guajara Campus, where the group toured the General and Humanities Library, paying particular attention to the Rare Book Collection, which comprises 20,000 volumes and is held by only about ten universities nationwide. It consists of incunabula, manuscripts, personal collections, and printed volumes from the 15th to the 19th centuries.
View of the Old Fund.
This collection includes manuscripts and incunabula, the first books printed in Europe, from 1452, when Gutenberg invented the printing press, until 1501. It also comprises other printed volumes from the 16th to the 18th centuries and a historical collection of 19th-century works. Personal archives of writers and historians, donated to the University of La Laguna, are also part of this collection, often containing manuscripts from the researchers themselves. There, Paz Fernández-Palomeque, the head of these facilities, showed him some of the most valuable items held by the university, such as the "Book of Hours," an illuminated manuscript from 1547.
The visit also served to highlight the library not only as a repository of bibliography, but as a genuine resource for developing research, thanks to services such as the newspaper archive, the map library and subscriptions to high-impact scientific journals accessible for consultation by research staff.
Following the visiting minister's area of interest, the University of La Laguna also wanted to showcase the institution's industrial potential and, therefore, accompanied by the rector, they traveled to the Tenerife Science and Technology Park to visit one of the facilities of Wooptix, a spin-off company that emerged in 2016 from research on imaging technologies developed at the University of La Laguna.
Visit to the Wooptix "clean room".
Wooptix has offices in three locations: Tenerife, Madrid, and San Francisco. The technology company holds eleven patent families related to applications of its wavefront sensor. This corporation focuses on manufacturing tools that enable chip fabrication. Specifically, Phemet® performs semiconductor metrology, and its precision represents a significant leap forward in this field, which is why the company has prestigious partners such as Tokyo Electron and Intel Capital.
It has the backing of an EIC Accelerator, with a grant and investment of 2.5 million euros from the European Union, and has just concluded Round B of Financing which has closed at 11 million euros with the participation of the EU, CDTI, Tokyo Electron, Intel Capital, Bullnet, Mondragón, Caixa Capital Risk, and Fresnel Technologies.
The company's CEO, José Manuel Rodríguez Ramos, who is also a professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering, acted as a guide for this visit, which took them to the company's clean room. Access required wearing sterilized clothing to prevent any type of contamination from entering the premises.
The reason is that it houses two prototype semiconductor metrology machines with sub-nanometer precision. This instrumentation is essential for chip quality control and also for reducing the size of future chips, representing a strategic area of industrial development in the high-tech sector.
The minister signed the institution's Book of Honor.
Following the visit, during which he was able to sign the Book of Honor of the University of La Laguna, Minister Gómez expressed his surprise at the important bibliographic treasure that the institution possesses in its Old Collection and valued very positively the strength of the company Wooptix in such competitive areas as optics and semiconductors.
Spanish 
English 
French