On January 15, 2025, the annual general meeting of the association Kompetenzzentrum Ultrapräzise Oberflächenbearbeitung e.V. (UPOB) took place at the IOM in Leipzig. The members took the opportunity to exchange views on the association's concerns and to discuss the direction of past and future activities. The exchange already took place the evening before during a get-together. The general meeting itself took place in the IOM lecture hall and was organized jointly by the “Ultra-Precision Surfaces” research division of the Leibniz Institute of Surface Engineering and Trionplas Technologies GmbH.

The “Ultra-Precision Surface Processing” competence center (UPOB) is dedicated to the further development of processes for the production of technical functional surfaces with the highest precision. An essential element of this further development is the metrological characterization of these surfaces. For this reason, large companies, university institutes and non-university research institutes in this field have joined forces to combine their scientific and technical expertise. In optics and precision engineering, special processing methods for surfaces of any shape, methods for correcting polishing errors, and techniques for coating optics are of great industrial relevance. The development of devices for lithography of structures smaller than one hundred nanometers and online monitoring in ultra-precision machining are also of crucial importance.