Professional service is a key factor for all our customers. High uptime, fast response, low maintenance costs and an excellent helpdesk are essential for meeting the demands of the modern industry. Therefore, the ION-TOF Service is continually improving its structure, functions and offered services.

Today ION-TOF expands its services to a new form of on-line support. With this new service, professional help is just a mouse click away. In addition to the on-line support via VPN, ION-TOF now offers on-line support via Webex^TM. This new technology enables our service engineers to check the systems on-line while the customer can follow all actions and discuss the problems simultaneously. With Webex^TM the engineer can also efficiently assist the customer with all kinds of operational questions.

For further information on this new service, please contact our Support Team.

Although the very fast moving economy of today hardly ever allows a moment to look back, the turn of the year always provides a good opportunity for reviewing all that happened during the last twelve months.

Going over the figures for last year was very satisfying: We are very proud to announce that 2006 was the most successful year in our history so far. We increased our sales to a highly satisfactory number of instruments in the past year. In addition to further developing the historically strong markets such as USA, Europe and Japan, we also managed to enter new ones in 2006.

Our market success is mainly based on the TOF.SIMS 5 product line and its field-proven performance, which is still unmatched. Up to now, we have installed more than 50 TOF.SIMS 5 instruments worldwide. In 2006, we also introduced a new TOF-SIMS instrument to the market, the TOF.SIMS 300 R. With this first fully-automated tool, we strengthened our position as the preferred partner for the application of TOF-SIMS in the semiconductor industry. The first machine has already been successfully installed at the Center for Nanoelectronic Technology (CNT) in Dresden, Germany.

Not only have we made technological progress during the last year, but we also continued to put effort into our services. The last enhancement was the introduction of the Webex^TM online support, which was successfully tested in 2006 and officially launched five weeks ago (see news of 21.01.2007: "Professional help on-site in an instant").

Looking back on such a good year, we are very much looking forward to rising to the new technical and commercial challenges during the year 2007.

Last year the Technical University Vienna decided to invest in a new surface science instrument and purchased a new high configuration TOF.SIMS 5. This instrument is now the most important tool for Prof Herbert Hutter and his team and the key instrument for the new Christian Doppler Laboratory for Surface and Interface Analysis with TOF-SIMS.

The Laboratory was officially opened last week, and the ceremony was attended by notable people from the Science and Development Ministry, Christian Doppler Research Association (CDG), AT&S, the University and the surface science community.

The Christian Doppler Research Association named after the Austrian physicist and mathematician, Christian Andreas Doppler, is a non-profit association whose aim is to promote the development in the areas of natural sciences, technology and economy as well as their industrial implementation and utilisation.

The new laboratory will be supported by CDG and AT&S and will focus on applied research for the development of printed circuit boards. AT&S is the European market leader for printed circuit boards and one of the world’s largest producers.

CDG and AT&S will generously fund Prof Hutter and his team with 770,000.- Euros over the next seven years.