The ground floor of Casa del Munizioniere is mainly occupied by laboratories to design, construct and integrate astronomical instrumentation (see). Activities related to feasibility studies, developing and testing of ideas and early stage projects take place in our laboratories as well.

Facilities includes:

• a class 1000 clean room;
• optical benches and related devices;
• a cryogenic-vacuum chamber (down to 16^oK) and vacuum pump systems;
• laboratory instrumentation;
• several dedicated PCs and Work Stations to develop and run control, acquisition, data analysis and simulation software.

In the past years these laboratory facilities have been used to develop several instruments (see), like Visible Cameras, Spectrographs, Active and Adaptive Optics Systems, Prime Focus Cameras and Multi Conjugate Adaptive Optics Systems; most of them are still working at TNG, LBT and VLT telescopes.

New projects in co-operation with the industry (see) are in progress in order to stimulate the technological transfer between the research field and the industrial world.