New Dimension Icon Redefines Performance and Productivity

Just over a month into its official world-wide release, the Dimension® Icon™ AFM system has made a worldwide impact with a powerful combination of superior performance, enhanced productivity, and expanded versatility. Released at nano tech 2009 in Japan in mid-February, the Icon impressed visitors to the Veeco booth with its demonstration of true atomic resolution in a large-sample system, paired with extensive enhancements to the software ease of use and functionality. The Icon is the first large-sample AFM to image at resolution levels previously only possible with high-end, small-sample AFMs.

According to one of the Icon’s beta users, Professor Ralf Seemann of Saarland University, Germany, “The Icon provides high-quality data more easily, and in a shorter period of time, than any other AFM that we have used.”

Building upon the world’s most proven large-sample AFM platform, the latest member of Veeco’s Dimension product line is already developing a reputation for providing the ultimate large-sample AFM performance, exceptional time to result, and superior application and sample versatility for nanoscale materials research. The system utilizes a revolutionary XYZ closed-loop head that scans at high-speed rates while delivering extremely low drift and low noise. A new high-resolution camera leverages a suite of integrated feedback alignment tools to enable faster probe positioning and sample navigation, allowing users to more easily locate features of interest. Finally, the redesigned software offers an intuitive workflow and provides default parameters for a wide variety of experiment modes that distill even the most advanced AFM processes into preconfigured settings. These features combine to drastically cut set-up, navigation, stabilization and scan times, allowing the system to acquire artifact-free data in much less time than is possible with any competing AFM on the market.

“Veeco’s Dimension Icon represents a new generation of high-performance, easy-to-use AFMs, having been engineered from the ground up to incorporate all of our latest AFM modes and techniques,” said Mark R. Munch, Ph.D., Executive Vice President, Veeco Metrology. “The Icon is the first large-sample AFM specifically designed to address atomic force microscopy needs of both the research lab and industrial applications. With the Icon, our customers can, more simply than ever, perform analysis ranging from quantitative automated characterization to atomic scale imaging across our core markets of material science, semiconductor, data storage, and energy research.”

The Icon continued its world tour with a March workshop at The National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, MD, and an Exhibitor Tutorial, “Significant Improvements in Atomic Force Microscopy Lower the Barrier for Obtaining High-Quality Data” at the American Physical Society (APS) Annual Meeting in Pittsburgh, PA.

Click here for more on the Dimension Icon and to see for yourself how this large-sample AFM can redefine performance and productivity for your application.