Detail20 Years of Nanonis SPM Controller
Turning frustration into innovation: How a pioneering product changed the way that scientists could tackle experimental challenges
Frustration in a research lab can be part of the daily routine. Often that frustration is related to measurement equipment not performing up to the task, being unintuitive and cumbersome to operate. A lot of attention is required by the instrumentation, attention that should have been better devoted to science.
This frustration was present 22 years ago, but while most researchers would just have accepted the situation, a PhD student at ETH Zurich decided that this was not how things should be. After founding Nanonis (to the blog post Nanonis turns 20), it took less than one and a half years to bring a novel SPM control system to market, driven by the vision of building the most user-friendly and powerful SPM control system that would allow scientists to fully focus on their core investigations.
Many PhD and Master's students contributed to writing LabVIEW software, which would improve the capabilities and simplify the operation of the existing SPM controller and a variety of ancillary instruments required to perform ncAFM measurements. That software was the starting point of the early Nanonis user interface.
But what about signal processing? FPGA-technology is ubiquitous nowadays, but more than two decades ago it was something completely new for scientific instrumentation. Most modern instruments at the time used a mixture of analog logic and DSPs, and were still operated partially on the front panel and partially by software. The result was a mixed and incoherent user experience at best.
National Instruments' FPGA pioneer program arrived just in time, providing a platform and development framework to develop instrumentation using almost the same programming language as for the user interface. That made it not only possible for a very small team to develop a full measurement system from start to finish, but also allowed the design of the first fully software-controlled and fully digital SPM control system, ditching mixed analog and digital logic and multiple user interfaces. The end result: A fully integrated system, with state of the art electronics and with a coherent, user-friendly user interface.
The journey towards the current generation of Nanonis SPM Control Systems started with the delivery of the first controller to a scientist in Japan in early 2004. More than 20 years and 1400 control systems later, our vision remains the same: Building the most user-friendly and powerful SPM control system allowing scientists to fully focus on their core investigations. And we have no plan to rest on our laurels.