Company Profile
Gatan Inc
Company Overview
Gatan, Inc. is the world's leading manufacturer of instrumentation and software used to enhance and extend the operation and performance of electron microscopes. Gatan's products, which are fully compatible with all brands of electron microscopes, cover the entire range of the analytical process from specimen preparation and manipulation to imaging and analysis. Our customer base spans the complete spectrum of end users of analytical instrumentation typically found in industrial, governmental and academic laboratories. The applications addressed by these scientists and researchers include metallurgy, semiconductors, electronics, biological science, new materials research and biotechnology.
The Gatan brand name is recognized and respected throughout the worldwide scientific community and is synonymous with high quality products and the industry's leading technology.
Company History
Gatan’s employees are an important part of our business, and we’d like you to understand what our business is all about and what makes us an industry leader and our employees special.
Who is Gatan and what we do…
Peter and Rex Swan incorporated Gatan in Pennsylvania in 1964. For the first fifteen years, the Company focused on contract manufacturing involving high-precision machining and the manufacture of transmission electron microscope specimen holders, notably for the high voltage microscopes in use at that time. In 1979, Gatan introduced its first major product for the electron microscope market, the DuoMill, a high-precision ion-milling system used to thin a specimen to electron transparency so that it could be successfully viewed in an electron microscope.
During the next five years, Gatan continued to expand its specimen preparation and holder product offerings, becoming the preeminent supplier to microscope manufacturers and end users. The Electron Energy Loss Spectrometer (EELS) and highly successful TV camera for surveying and imaging specimens electronically were conceived and introduced. The latter served as Gatan’s entry into the imaging market. In 1983, Gatan opened a research and development facility in Pleasanton, California, 40 miles southeast of San Francisco. This facility also became the anchor for the sales and support team covering the rapid growing Pacific Rim and Western United States. Later that same year, Gatan formed a German subsidiary, Gatan GmbH, which currently handles direct sales in Germany and supports the Company’s distribution network throughout Europe. A similar subsidiary was established in the United Kingdom in 1988.
Gatan substantially expanded its technology and its product into analytical applications with the introduction of the first parallel energy loss spectrometer (PEELS) in 1985 and from this were developed a series of analytical tools, the GIF, GIF 2000, GIF Tridiem and our current GIF Quantum instruments. These products provide extremely useful compositional information in the form of elemental mapping of a specimen and advantages in improving image contrast and quality through energy filtering of the election image.
In 1990, Gatan established itself as the leader in TEM digital imaging by introducing the first commercial slow-scan CCD (SSC) camera. This changed greatly the way that electron microscopy is carried out, allowing TEM users to view, process and analyze their images on-line. In 1995, Gatan introduced the second generation of the CCD cameras, called Multi-scan CCD (MSC) cameras and since then has continued to develop faster and more sensitive cameras, culminating in our current range of Ultrascan, Orius and K2 products. These cameras have supplanted film as the medium of choice for electron microscopists worldwide and have improved the overall productivity of the electron microscope by a great margin.
Alongside the camera and analytical products Gatan developed Gatan Microscopy Suite software which is now ubiquitous in electron microscopy and is the most widely used EM software package.
In June 2000 Gatan acquired the EM Product Group from Oxford Instruments. The business has now been integrated into Gatan and is our center of Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) product development and manufacture. These products include Cathodoluminescence detectors, Cryotransfer systems and specialist specimen stages for SEM.
In 1996 we became part of the Roper Industries group and today Gatan has manufacturing plants in the US and the UK, additional Sales and Service offices in France, Germany, Singapore, Japan and India and further Service organizations in Korea and Taiwan. Gatan now the largest manufacturer of EM related equipment, with customers in all the important EM research centers around the world with a broad range of market leading products.