By Paul-Henri Matha
Sony, the famous Japanese company with over 110,000 employees and global revenue around €80bn, actually comprises around 100 companies. One of them is Sony DADC, who joined DVN in 2024. Shortly ago, Wolfgang Huhn and I had the great pleasure of visiting.
Headquartered in Thalgau, Austria and established in 1983 as a compact disc plant, the company now operate in three locations: Austria, Czechia, and the USA. With around 900 employees and a revenue of €200m, Sony DADC’s core business focuses on optical discs, including CDs, DVDs, regular and UHD Blu-Ray discs, and PlayStation games. Their production facilities handle all global Sony disc manufacturing except for Japan. While the optical disc business is declining from its peak (in the 2000s with more than 2 billion units per year), the plant’s rich history is celebrated, with a Beatles guitar prominently displayed in the main hall—a nod to the music legacy tied to the site. The plant’s location, just 10 km from Salzburg, Mozart’s city, adds to its unique appeal.
For the past decade, Sony DADC have been exploring new business opportunities to leverage their extensive expertise and infrastructure. While their optical disc production processes focus on polycarbonate layers with high precision, the potential to repurpose these capabilities is exciting—particularly in producing optical components like microlens arrays (MLA).
Key capabilities derived from optical disc production
- Nanometre-precision optical design
- Master creation using advanced laser technology (mirroring design, ~1-hour duration)
- Integration of the master into injection tools to produce wafer plates (avoiding the need for complex, long-lead-time injection moulds)
- UV curing
- Multilayer coatings, such as metallic layers to create patterns, or the three-layer coating used for PlayStation discs
- Wafer cutting to transition from a disc shape to final optical lens production—a new process to be implemented for this application
(note: the 2.7-second cycle time mentioned in this article is for optical disc production. Adaptations for optical components may involve additional processing steps and different overall production times)
Sony DADC are initially targeting lighting applications such as signalling and road projection, but the potential extends far beyond MLA technology. Optical lenses, including microöptics for homogeneous design signatures, diffractive optical designs for direct imaging modules, and freeform optical designs, could also be explored—all with the promise of efficient production cycles and high scalability.
