About Laser Thermal
The people and science behind Laser Thermal’s instruments.
Laser Thermal builds precision instruments that measure how heat moves through materials and architectures. The company grew out of years of research at an innovative thermal science center at the University of Virginia (the ExSiTE Lab).
Thermal Metrology for Materials and Architectures.
We serve the scientists and engineers pushing materials and architectures to their thermal limits.
From researchers characterizing heterogeneous materials to thermal and reliability engineers developing semiconductor systems and architectures, the work demands new measurement capabilities and novel approaches to thermal design and performance.
Conventional methods weren’t designed for this. We designed something else.
Our thermal metrology instruments measure across an unprecedented range of thermal properties, sample geometries, and length scales, from nanoscale thin films to bulk components. Our tools assess heat flow through real-world thin films, interfaces, and stacked materials at the relevant scales, without the complexity, variability, idealized conditions or constraints of conventional methods. Decades of research made this possible. The result is accurate, high-throughput thermal characterization that saves time, reduces costs, produces high-trust analysis, and fosters innovation.
We are a precision instrument company built by the experts behind the science in thermal metrology.
Led by a team of PhDs with deep expertise in microelectronics, optoelectronics, and thermal metrology, we bring over a century of combined R&D experience. We built Laser Thermal to bring that expertise into innovative instruments and characterization approaches the field has never had.
Trusted where the stakes are the highest.
With over ten issued or pending patents and some R&D funding from DARPA, the U.S. Air Force, and the Department of Defense, the organizations that cannot afford to be wrong trust us to get it right. From leading semiconductor manufacturers, materials engineering organizations, to research institutions, the teams setting the standard in thermal performance rely on Laser Thermal.
Mission
To serve the scientists and engineers pushing materials and architectures to their thermal limits, by providing direct, accurate, high-throughput thermal measurement capabilities the field has never had before.
Where We Build
All research, development, and manufacturing take place at our facility in Charlottesville, Virginia. Meet the team behind Laser Thermal on our Leadership page.
Laser Thermal Awarded NIST Collaboration
As part of the CHIPS for America initiative, our SSTR-F tool will address vital challenges in semiconductor metrology.
History
Laser Thermal was founded to bring the ExSiTE Lab‘s thermal metrology research out of the university setting and into instruments that engineering teams could run themselves. The company established its Charlottesville, Virginia headquarters in 2021, built around a single innovation: steady state thermoreflectance in fiber optics (SSTR-F), a method that made high throughput, non-contact thermal measurement practical outside a research lab. That method, now the core of FASTR, was named the University of Virginia’s 2024 Invention of the Year, credited to co-inventors Patrick Hopkins, John Gaskins, and Brian Foley.
Demand followed quickly. Within a year, a major semiconductor IDM purchased a Laser Thermal instrument for its own characterization work, and that early adoption set the direction for everything after: build instruments accurate enough for research and fast enough for production.
Growth since has followed the problems customers and government partners brought to us. Several research awards have funded the platform’s expansion, including a 300 millimeter FASTR built for full wafer testing and NTM, developed for sub-10 nanometer nanostructure characterization, alongside additional instruments still in development. A single NTM unit has since been delivered to a government laboratory as part of that continuing work, ahead of any broader commercial release. TOPS shipped in 2025, extending the same measurement philosophy to bulk and soft materials.
That first sale has since grown into installations across manufacturing, government research, and academia. That work has carried Laser Thermal beyond the United States. In 2026, imec, one of the world’s most respected research centers, installed a FASTR system, the company’s first installation outside the country. Laser Thermal continues to build from Charlottesville toward the same goal that started it: giving the scientists and engineers pushing materials to their thermal limits measurement capabilities the field didn’t have before.
