Professional service is a key factor for all our customers. High uptime, fast response, low maintenance costs and an excellent helpdesk are essential for meeting the demands of the modern industry. Therefore, the ION-TOF Service is continually improving its structure, functions and offered services.

Today ION-TOF expands its services to a new form of on-line support. With this new service, professional help is just a mouse click away. In addition to the on-line support via VPN, ION-TOF now offers on-line support via Webex^TM. This new technology enables our service engineers to check the systems on-line while the customer can follow all actions and discuss the problems simultaneously. With Webex^TM the engineer can also efficiently assist the customer with all kinds of operational questions.

For further information on this new service, please contact our Support Team.

Although the very fast moving economy of today hardly ever allows a moment to look back, the turn of the year always provides a good opportunity for reviewing all that happened during the last twelve months.

Going over the figures for last year was very satisfying: We are very proud to announce that 2006 was the most successful year in our history so far. We increased our sales to a highly satisfactory number of instruments in the past year. In addition to further developing the historically strong markets such as USA, Europe and Japan, we also managed to enter new ones in 2006.

Our market success is mainly based on the TOF.SIMS 5 product line and its field-proven performance, which is still unmatched. Up to now, we have installed more than 50 TOF.SIMS 5 instruments worldwide. In 2006, we also introduced a new TOF-SIMS instrument to the market, the TOF.SIMS 300 R. With this first fully-automated tool, we strengthened our position as the preferred partner for the application of TOF-SIMS in the semiconductor industry. The first machine has already been successfully installed at the Center for Nanoelectronic Technology (CNT) in Dresden, Germany.

Not only have we made technological progress during the last year, but we also continued to put effort into our services. The last enhancement was the introduction of the Webex^TM online support, which was successfully tested in 2006 and officially launched five weeks ago (see news of 21.01.2007: "Professional help on-site in an instant").

Looking back on such a good year, we are very much looking forward to rising to the new technical and commercial challenges during the year 2007.

Last year the Technical University Vienna decided to invest in a new surface science instrument and purchased a new high configuration TOF.SIMS 5. This instrument is now the most important tool for Prof Herbert Hutter and his team and the key instrument for the new Christian Doppler Laboratory for Surface and Interface Analysis with TOF-SIMS.

The Laboratory was officially opened last week, and the ceremony was attended by notable people from the Science and Development Ministry, Christian Doppler Research Association (CDG), AT&S, the University and the surface science community.

The Christian Doppler Research Association named after the Austrian physicist and mathematician, Christian Andreas Doppler, is a non-profit association whose aim is to promote the development in the areas of natural sciences, technology and economy as well as their industrial implementation and utilisation.

The new laboratory will be supported by CDG and AT&S and will focus on applied research for the development of printed circuit boards. AT&S is the European market leader for printed circuit boards and one of the world’s largest producers.

CDG and AT&S will generously fund Prof Hutter and his team with 770,000.- Euros over the next seven years.

Since its early days TOF-SIMS has been a versatile technique, but recently an even wider range of samples have been analyzed. The advent of such technologies as the Bismuth liquid metal ion gun has seen TOF-SIMS used routinely for imaging and depth profiling of organic and biological materials. However, Dr Rana Sodhi and his colleagues at the University of Toronto may just have come up with the most unusual samples yet.

In a study shown on the Discovery Channel’s Conspiracy Test program the University of Toronto team used an ION-TOF TOF-SIMS IV in the investigation into claimed extraterrestrial materials. Originally aired on August 14th, the “Alien Abduction” show follows a study of metallic samples recovered from the bodies of claimed alien abduction victims. By combining TOF-SIMS and FE-SEM, the materials research group at Toronto was able to successfully determine the origin of these materials. So were they alien in nature? Well you’ll have to watch the show to find out! For those of you who missed the show it will be repeated on October 24th at 1pm ET.

A small preview can be seen here on YouTube.

ION-TOF is launching an exciting new surface analysis instrument, the Qtac¹⁰⁰. The new product will be presented at AVS 54^th , Seattle, USA, SIMS XVI and ALC'07, Kanazawa, Japan.

The Qtac¹⁰⁰ is a high sensitivity low energy ion scattering (LEIS) instrument able to chemically and quantitatively analyse the very top atomic layer of the sample, unlike all other surface analysis techniques, which integrate over several layers. This surface analysis instrument makes a significant addition to the range of instruments available to the surface analyst, and will quickly be established as an essential part of a comprehensive surface science laboratory.

This is a result of the collaboration with Professor Hidde Brongersma, a pioneer of LEIS and its applications firstly at the Technical University of Eindhoven, and then at Calipso BV. The combination of Professor Brongersma’s expertise and ION-TOF’s well established technologies have produced a powerful instrument for top atomic layer spectroscopy, surface chemical mapping, and both static non-destructive depth profiling and dynamic sputter depth profiling.

Applications are found particularly for catalysts, fuel cells, semiconductors, surface modification, thin layer pinhole detection, atomic resolution depth profiling, or any application requiring atomic layer analysis.

For more information about this unique instrument, please use the enquiry form on our Contact Page or have a look at our Product Section.

Professor Hidde H. Brongersma