This institute was created on 1 January 2004, from the merging of five different Franche-Comté laboratories working in mechanics, optics and telecommunications, electronics, time-frequency, energetics, and fluidics.

FEMTO-ST Institute is formed by 7 departments, supported by different common services in state-of-the-art micro/nanofabrication, constituting part of the six national technology center networks of CNRS (RENATECH).

Research teams: The research conducted in the DISC department is focused on E-health, micro and nanosystems dedicated to health, information safety on the complex systems, MiDi Micro and distributed intelligent nanosystems, and the transport and mobility services.

Research teams: This department is specialized in high-stability oscillators, acoustical-electronicals and piezoelectrics, and time-frequency metrology.

It is composed of three teams: This department is specialized in robotics, mechatronics, automatic control and artificial intelligence.