TOF-SIMS Upgrade - Background information

Many of the laboratory time-of-flight SIMS instruments that were state-of-the-art in the late 80s and early 90s are still prolific producers of valuable materials data. However they suffer from outdated data acquisition systems that in many cases are no longer properly supported because the original instrument manufacturers have moved to the latest technology or changed their emphasis. In the mean time there has been a revolution in the performance of personal computers with the result that they more than match the workstations that were considered necessary in the past. Many of the users of these older instruments are aware of the potential benefits of moving to PCs and indeed already use them for report writing and some data processing. However they are severely hampered by the difficulties of interfacing to specialist fast timing electronics and by the need to extract data from proprietary format data files on outdated disk formats. In practice this means that they have had to maintain the old equipment in working order alongside any new PCs.

Kore Technology personnel have been involved in the development of time-of-flight SIMS instruments since the mid 1980s in Cambridge Mass Spectrometry and Kratos. In the early years this exclusively involved large laboratory based instruments. However after its foundation in 1991 Kore extended time-of-flight technology into portable and bench-top instrumentation requiring the development of new designs from scratch. The design decisions, taken in this more price sensitive market, have had the happy result that Kore can now offer a relatively inexpensive upgrade path for the users of laboratory instrumentation described above.

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Last updated: Thursday, September 15, 2005, 12:00