20 Years Anniversary

We are proud to celebrate our company's 20 years anniversary and look back at our history during which we have had the honor to serve many customers with state-of-the-art software for microscopy.

The Short History

In December 1998, Image Metrology was established as a spin off company from DTU (Danish Technical University) and DFM (Danish Institute for Fundamental Metrology). The company was build on the SPIP (Scanning Probe Image Processor) software developed by Jan Friis Jørgensen during his PhD and post doc period at NIST. It was the perfect timing for starting a business, for  four main reasons:

1.  Scanning Probe Microscopy was becoming a more mature technique and being used by an increasing number of research institutes.
2.  Personal computers were becoming more powerful and advanced image processing software, previously limited to more expensive Unix workstations, could now be implemented on more common Windows based personal computers.
3. The Internet had become mature and widely available, so it was easy to market and distribute SPIP test versions globally.
4. There were only few software packages with limited functionalities available and SPIP could fulfil the demand for more powerful software.

It took only five months to mature and commercialize the SPIP software and receive the first orders. Since then SPIP has become the de facto standard for SPM image analysis and used by microscopists, researches and students worldwide.
During the years the focus of Image Metrology has always been on developing advanced and accurate image processing software, and yet easy to use, for customers demanding the very best. We are still committed to this mission, which we are now pursuing together with our mother company Digital Surf.

MountainsSPIP^TM- The New Product

I 2014 Image Metrology was acquired by Digital Surf, www.digitalsurf.com, which came naturally as our products had a lot in common and complemented each other. By sharing our knowledge and development resources we could accomplish and create even more powerful and comprehensive software products. This vision will soon be materialized by the MountainsSPIP™ software package, www.imagemet.com/products/mountainsspip-8 , expected to enter the market in the first half year of 2019.
We are currently in a transition phase where Mountains^® and SPIP^TM are combined in to the new MountainsSPIP^TM product, - and now is the perfect time to invest in SPIP as we for a limited time are offering an extra MountainsSPIP license for free, as soon as it is released.

The Future

We are still committed to serving the SPM community with the best software tools and will continue our innovative development of new features for MountainsSPIP and provide our customers with the best possible service. Therefore, we look forward to an even closer cooperation with our valued customers, partners, distributors and colleagues over the next many years. Share your SPIP and MountainsSPIP experiences and wishes with us - we are here for you.

Best regards,
Jan F. Jørgensen, CEO

Scanning Probe Microscopy

Image Metrology's founder, Dr. Jan F. Jørgensen recently gave an interview discussing the field of Scanning Probe Microscopy, which below is re-produced for the knowledge of SPIP™ users.

The SPM Technique

Scanning Probe Microscopy or SPM, is a technique that uses a very sharp probe to scan over a surface in a raster pattern. When the probe is within atomic distance of the surface an AFM (Atomic Force Microscopy) probe can sense the repulsive and attractive forces from the surface. The height of the probe is controlled such that the force is kept constant meaning that also the distance to the surface is kept constant. Therefore, a topographic landscape image can be produced by recording the z position of the probe for the x, y positions.

Effectively the AFM probe traces over the surface of a substrate and records the surface topography as it does so.

Scanning Tunneling Microscopy

STM (Scanning Tunneling Microscopy) works in a similar manner to AFM but uses a different sensing method. In STM there is a bias voltage set between the probe and the surface and when in atomic distance to the surface a tunneling current can be measured by the probe.

Because both of the techniques involve scanning very close to the surface it is possible to obtain images with atomic resolution.

The SPM Advantages

The big advantage of SPM techniques compared to optical techniques is the ability to obtain height information and the unique capability of obtaining images at atomic resolution. SPM allows a lot of geometrical information to be extracted at a very detailed level.

To obtain geometrically correct images it is crucial that the movement of the probe relative to the surface can be controlled better than the desired resolution, which is a big challenge. It is almost impossible to create images where the pixels are acquired equidistantly and where there is no coupling between the axes. Even in the most perfect instrument problems with environmental noise, vibration and temperature changes will lead to imperfect images.

In SPIP™ we have implemented several methods to characterize imperfections and correct for them which allows extremely accurate measurements to be performed.