The start of the new 2011/12 fiscal year marked the launch of Carl Zeiss Microscopy. 2,500 employees of MicroImaging und Nano Technology Systems now form the new business group in the Carl Zeiss Group. In the future the company will be the world´s only supplier to offer one-stop, innovative systems and solutions for light and electron microscopy. Customers from research and industry are increasingly using both systems and want integrated software and workflow solutions. The combination of Carl Zeiss MicroImaging and Nano Technology Systems into one business group fully reflects this trend. "By fusing the two worlds of microscopy, we are opening up totally new perspectives to our customers in science and industry," says Dr. Ulrich Simon, Head of Carl Zeiss Microscopy. "Carl Zeiss has been a pioneer in this field for more than 160 years. Carl Zeiss and Ernst Abbe together invented scientific microscopy more than 160 years ago. Since then, the company has constantly played a crucial role in shaping the progress of this technology. We are now opening an exciting new chapter in this success story." Dr. Frank Stietz, Head of the Materials Division at Carl Zeiss Microscopy: "Today, in view of current technological developments and customer expectations, it is only logical that the two areas should merge. However, the market was totally different ten years ago. At that time the majority of electron microscopy customers came from the semiconductor industry." The Nano Technology Systems division is now being removed from the Semiconductor Manufacturing technology business group and incorporated in Carl Zeiss Microscopy. Correlative technology underscores just how much potential is offered by combining light and electron microscopy. One prominent example is Professor Jeff Lichtman of Harvard University, who is pioneering brain mapping with light and electron microscopy by generating three- dimensional maps of the brain. This is a groundbreaking project that is comparable to the decoding of the genome. In industry, integrated systems enable enormous advances in productivity for particle analysis, for example: instead of the 30 minutes required in the past, the automated examination now takes just a few seconds.
