Company type | Subsidiary |
---|---|
Industry | Scientific and Technical Instruments |
Founded | 1971 |
Founder | Dr. Lynwood Swanson |
Headquarters | , United States |
Area served | global |
Key people | Dr. Don R. Kania (CEO), Anthony Trunzo, Executive Vice President and CFO Bradley J. Thies, Vice President, General Counsel |
Products | Focused ion beam scanning electron microscope transmission electron microscope DualBeam, light microscope, software |
Revenue | $930M (2015) [1] |
$129.4M (2014) | |
$105.1M (2014) | |
Number of employees | 2800+ (2015) |
Parent | Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. |
Subsidiaries | ASPEX Corporation (dba FEI Delmont) (Pennsylvania, United States), Visualization Sciences Group Inc. (dba FEI Houston) (United States) and 26 others. [2] |
Website | www |
FEI Company (Field Electron and Ion Company, FEI) was an American company that designed, manufactured, and supported microscope technology. Headquartered in Hillsboro, Oregon, FEI had over 2,800 employees and sales and service operations in more than 50 countries around the world. Formerly listed on the NASDAQ, it is now a subsidiary of Thermo Fisher Scientific.
The FEI company was founded in 1971 as Field Electron and Ion Company by Dr. Lynwood W. Swanson, Mr. Noel A. Martin and Mr. Lloyd Swenson, as a supplier of electron and ion beam sources for field emission research and electron microscopy. [3] The name was shortened to FEI Company in 1973. In 1978, Dr. J.H. Orloff, a research specialist in electrostatic optics for field emission ion and electron sources, joined the company as its fourth partner. Swanson was a professor of applied physics at the Oregon Graduate Center, and Orloff's doctoral adviser. [4] FEI's introduction of the liquid metal ion source in 1981 led to its application in the semiconductor industry for mask repair and defect analysis. [5] The current company was formed by the 1997 merger between FEI and Philips Electron Optics, [6] and the 1999 acquisition of ion beam company Micrion. As such, the company can trace its roots in electron microscopy to the early commercial instruments produced by Philips Electron Optics in the 1940s.
On December 20, 2006, Philips Business Electronics International B.V. sold its shares of common stock in FEI Company reducing its shareholding in FEI to zero. In May 2011, the company announced a second straight quarter of record revenue and profits, with the company totaling nearly $200 million in revenue for their second quarter. [7] The company attributed the growth to a diversification of its clientele. [8]
On May 27, 2016, Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. announced [9] its acquisition of FEI Company for US$4.2 billion, which commenced in early 2017. [10] At the time of the transaction, FEI had more than 2700 employees in over 20 countries. [11] The FEI trademark was phased out in favor of the Materials & Structural Analysis division of Thermo Fisher Scientific.
The products manufactured by the division include focused ion beam workstations, scanning electron microscopes, transmission electron microscopes, and focusing columns.
The division has research and development centers in Hillsboro, Oregon; Eindhoven, The Netherlands; Munich, Germany; Shanghai, China PRC; Tokyo, Japan; Brno, Czech Republic; Canberra, Australia; Trondheim, Norway; and Bordeaux, France. It has sales and service operations in more than 50 countries.
An electron microscope is a microscope that uses a beam of electrons as a source of illumination. They use electron optics that are analogous to the glass lenses of an optical light microscope to control the electron beam, for instance focusing them to produce magnified images or electron diffraction patterns. As the wavelength of an electron can be up to 100,000 times smaller than that of visible light, electron microscopes have a much higher resolution of about 0.1 nm, which compares to about 200 nm for light microscopes. Electron microscope may refer to:
Microscopy is the technical field of using microscopes to view objects and areas of objects that cannot be seen with the naked eye. There are three well-known branches of microscopy: optical, electron, and scanning probe microscopy, along with the emerging field of X-ray microscopy.
A microscope is a laboratory instrument used to examine objects that are too small to be seen by the naked eye. Microscopy is the science of investigating small objects and structures using a microscope. Microscopic means being invisible to the eye unless aided by a microscope.
A scanning electron microscope (SEM) is a type of electron microscope that produces images of a sample by scanning the surface with a focused beam of electrons. The electrons interact with atoms in the sample, producing various signals that contain information about the surface topography and composition of the sample. The electron beam is scanned in a raster scan pattern, and the position of the beam is combined with the intensity of the detected signal to produce an image. In the most common SEM mode, secondary electrons emitted by atoms excited by the electron beam are detected using a secondary electron detector. The number of secondary electrons that can be detected, and thus the signal intensity, depends, among other things, on specimen topography. Some SEMs can achieve resolutions better than 1 nanometer.
Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) is a microscopy technique in which a beam of electrons is transmitted through a specimen to form an image. The specimen is most often an ultrathin section less than 100 nm thick or a suspension on a grid. An image is formed from the interaction of the electrons with the sample as the beam is transmitted through the specimen. The image is then magnified and focused onto an imaging device, such as a fluorescent screen, a layer of photographic film, or a detector such as a scintillator attached to a charge-coupled device or a direct electron detector.
Electron optics is a mathematical framework for the calculation of electron trajectories in the presence of electromagnetic fields. The term optics is used because magnetic and electrostatic lenses act upon a charged particle beam similarly to optical lenses upon a light beam.
Focused ion beam, also known as FIB, is a technique used particularly in the semiconductor industry, materials science and increasingly in the biological field for site-specific analysis, deposition, and ablation of materials. A FIB setup is a scientific instrument that resembles a scanning electron microscope (SEM). However, while the SEM uses a focused beam of electrons to image the sample in the chamber, a FIB setup uses a focused beam of ions instead. FIB can also be incorporated in a system with both electron and ion beam columns, allowing the same feature to be investigated using either of the beams. FIB should not be confused with using a beam of focused ions for direct write lithography. These are generally quite different systems where the material is modified by other mechanisms.
Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. is an American supplier of analytical instruments, life sciences solutions, specialty diagnostics, laboratory, pharmaceutical and biotechnology services. Based in Waltham, Massachusetts, Thermo Fisher was formed through the merger of Thermo Electron and Fisher Scientific in 2006. Thermo Fisher Scientific has acquired other reagent, consumable, instrumentation, and service providers, including Life Technologies Corporation (2013), Alfa Aesar (2015), Affymetrix (2016), FEI Company (2016), BD Advanced Bioprocessing (2018), and PPD (2021).
JEOL, Ltd. is a major developer and manufacturer of electron microscopes and other scientific instruments, industrial equipment and medical equipment.
Aspex Corporation, founded in 1992, is a supplier of electron microscopy tools to researchers, developers and manufacturers working on Process control through automated scanning electron microscope and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy.
A magnetic lens is a device for the focusing or deflection of moving charged particles, such as electrons or ions, by use of the magnetic Lorentz force. Its strength can often be varied by usage of electromagnets.
Pittcon Editors’ Awards honoured the best new products on show at the Pittsburgh Conference on Analytical Chemistry and Applied Spectroscopy, or Pittcon, for 20 years from 1996 having been established by Dr Gordon Wilkinson, managing editor of Analytical Instrument Industry Report. On 8 March 2015, the event returned to the Morial Convention Center in New Orleans and this was the last occasion when the awards were presented.
Jonathan Harris Orloff is an American physicist, author and professor. Born in New York City, he is the eldest son of Monford Orloff and brother of pianist Carole Orloff and historian Chester Orloff. Orloff is known for his major fields of research in charged particle optics, applications of field emission processes, high-brightness electron and ion sources, focused ion and electron beams and their applications for micromachining, surface analysis and microscopy and instrumentation development for semiconductor device manufacturing.
Serial block-face scanning electron microscopy is a method to generate high resolution three-dimensional images from small samples. The technique was developed for brain tissue, but it is widely applicable for any biological samples. A serial block-face scanning electron microscope consists of an ultramicrotome mounted inside the vacuum chamber of a scanning electron microscope. Samples are prepared by methods similar to that in transmission electron microscopy (TEM), typically by fixing the sample with aldehyde, staining with heavy metals such as osmium and uranium then embedding in an epoxy resin. The surface of the block of resin-embedded sample is imaged by detection of back-scattered electrons. Following imaging the ultramicrotome is used to cut a thin section from the face of the block. After the section is cut, the sample block is raised back to the focal plane and imaged again. This sequence of sample imaging, section cutting and block raising can acquire many thousands of images in perfect alignment in an automated fashion. Practical serial block-face scanning electron microscopy was invented in 2004 by Winfried Denk at the Max-Planck-Institute in Heidelberg and is commercially available from Gatan Inc., Thermo Fisher Scientific (VolumeScope) and ConnectomX.
TESCAN is one of the world's leading manufacturers of Scanning Electron Microscopes (SEM), Focused Ion Beam-Scanning Electron Microscopes (FIB-SEM), Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopes (STEM), and microcomputed tomography (microCT).[2] TESCAN serves customers in materials science, geosciences, life sciences and semiconductor markets. TESCAN is located in Brno, which is considered to be the cradle of electron microscopy in Europe. TESCAN has now produced over 3,000 SEMs and FIB-SEMs.
Mountains is an image analysis and surface metrology software platform published by the company Digital Surf. Its core is micro-topography, the science of studying surface texture and form in 3D at the microscopic scale. The software is dedicated to profilometers, 3D light microscopes ("MountainsMap"), scanning electron microscopes ("MountainsSEM") and scanning probe microscopes ("MountainsSPIP").
The Pittcon Heritage Award recognizes "outstanding individuals whose entrepreneurial careers shaped the instrumentation and laboratory supplies community." The award is jointly sponsored by the Pittsburgh Conference on Analytical Chemistry and Applied Spectroscopy (Pittcon) and the Science History Institute. The award is presented annually at a special ceremony during Pittcon.
The Oregon Graduate Center was a unique, private, postgraduate-only research university in Washington County, Oregon, on the west side of Portland, from 1963 to 2001. The center was renamed the Oregon Graduate Institute in 1989. The Institute merged with the Oregon Health Sciences University in 2001, and became the OGI School of Science and Engineering within the (renamed) Oregon Health & Science University. The School was discontinued in 2008 and its campus in 2014. Demolition of the campus buildings began February 2017.
A stigmator is a component of electron microscopes that reduces astigmatism of the beam by imposing a weak electric or magnetic quadrupole field on the electron beam.
Microcrystal electron diffraction, or MicroED, is a CryoEM method that was developed by the Gonen laboratory in late 2013 at the Janelia Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. MicroED is a form of electron crystallography where thin 3D crystals are used for structure determination by electron diffraction. Prior to this demonstration, macromolecular (protein) electron crystallography was only used on 2D crystals, for example.