Custom Design
Custom
Design
Ionoptika offers a custom vacuum instrumentation service, ranging from customised ion beams and vacuum chambers to fully bespoke instruments.
With over 25 years’ experience of building world-class instrumentation for universities around the world, Ionoptika has the expertise to help you with your next project. If you have a project in mind, please get in touch via our Contact Page, and we would be delighted to discuss it with you.
But don’t take our word for it. Read about some of the exciting projects we’ve delivered in the case studies below.
Services
- Ion beams
- UHV chambers
- Sample transfer mechanisms
- UHV translational stages
- Secondary electron imaging
- Custom electronics
Case Study #1
Single ion implantation tool – University of Surrey
In a three-year project between Ionoptika and the University of Surrey, a new custom instrument was commissioned in 2016 to implant single ions with extremely high precision deterministically.
Named Single Ion Multi-species Positioning at Low Energy (SIMPLE), Ionoptika installed the instrument in 2018. It comprises a custom, highly focused, sub-20 nm mass-filtered ion column, a nano-precision stage, and a high-sensitivity single ion implantation detection system.
You can read more about this project on the University of Surrey’s website.
Based on the SIMPLE platform, Ionoptika launched the Q-One instrument in 2019.
At this point in time I still do not know of a competing instrument with the capabilities provided by the Q-One product and would like to offer my praise for the instrument that Ionoptika have designed and built to our requirements. It has been and continues to be a great pleasure working with your team at Ionoptika on such a collaborative venture.
Case Study #2
Stigmatic imaging SIMS – The Rosalind Franklin Institute
A fascinating project that began with the simple brief of providing an ion beam for a prototype SIMS instrument at the Rosalind Franklin Institute (RFI). Initially, the customer planned to build the rest of the instrument, including the UHV chamber, XYZ stage, and imaging system. However, the folks at the RFI and the University of Oxford recognised that Ionoptika had the capabilities and experience to supply the complete system. So instead of spending all of their time building up a test bed before starting, they could focus their valuable time and efforts on more critical aspects of the project.
The new stigmatic imaging SIMS instrument is now installed at the University of Oxford. This new type of mass spectrometry imaging decouples acquisition time from spatial resolution, enabling rapid molecular mapping of biological tissues at unprecedented speed.
You can read more about this project on the Rosalind Franklin Insitute website.
We initially approached Ionoptika about providing an ion beam for our novel stigmatic imaging SIMS project. However, given their expertise in this area our discussions quickly turned to Ionoptika designing much more of the basic instrument for us. This has been very helpful as it has allowed us to focus on other key aspects of the project. They have been fantastic to work with on this project – very open and helpful and have a very collaborative approach that has really helped to improve the final design. My expectations have certainly been met and I would highly recommend them to anyone thinking of building an instrument for their lab.
Prior to moving the instrument, I was able to spend time at Ionoptika headquarters, testing the instrument. This was a great experience and the team at Ionoptika were brilliant and very efficient. I am looking forward to continuing to work with the team at Ionoptika and the University of Oxford to continue to develop this prototype.