History and mission
ASULAB, now a division of the Swatch Group Research and Development Ltd. was founded as ASULAB S.A. in 1980. With its foundation the staff and the know-how of the central development departments of Ebauches S.A. were brought together. The industrial activities of the former company Ebauches S.A. are currently being pursued by our sister company ETA S.A.
Our mission
ASULAB's mission is to develop and improve key technologies in watchmaking and in areas deriving directly from watchmaking technology (electronic and microtechnical systems). We pursue this mission by developing innovative products based on extensive applied research, most of them with a generic character.
Through community projects, we nurture contacts with higher education institutions, which enables us to apply the latest university research work.
Constant pressure on development completion times requires university knowledge to be transferred to product development in the most efficient manner. The (successful) execution of community projects with the university institutes calls for an industrial partner that, in addition to the actual R&D contribution, is also able to contribute our know-how of industrial practice and our markets. This role is played by ASULAB and enables us to remain in the forefront of scienctific development while providing the opportunity for our academic partners to participate in more specific objectives.
Fabrication des calibres Alpinist
At the same time, we endeavour to maintain good relations with our sister companies that are active in marketing and in production. Together with them we are able to press ahead with our developments and get them ready for the market. This approach makes it possible to implement innovative products quickly within a single company, or in other words, to unite the results of fundamental research and the demands of the market without knowledge transfer beyond the company and with a minimum of coordination effort.
Our work encompasses watches, their subsystems and components.
Research areas
Our research and development programme covers all the technological requirements for the development of watch products: electro-optical displays, sensors, electronics, metallic and non-metallic materials, micromechanics and microtechnology.
Given our experience of specific components and complex systems, we consider the development of high-tech watches to be one of the priority research and development areas. The tough requirements placed on subsystems and components in terms of power consumption and miniaturisation for these watches can also be used for other applications and to serve markets outside the watch industry.
Quartz tuning fork operating at 32,768 Hz
Pilot production
For some of our developments in the field of display systems and sensors, there are initially no production facilities within our sister companies. The creation of an adequate production facility in a sister company frequently requires an investment which cannot be justified in view of the small initial production volumes. In such cases, ASULAB completes its own equipment in order to be able to carry out pre-industrialisation production runs on promising products in house.
We have developed our own production facilities for the (relatively small volume) area of special polymers for applications in watch movements and watchcases. We sell these special polymer products to the technical market.
