20 Years at the Forefront of Raman Imaging
The Raman imaging company WITec celebrates its 20 th Anniversary. It was founded in
1997 as a 3-person spin-off from the Physics Department of the University of Ulm and has grown
into a company of 60 employees including the Ulm headquarters and its branch
offices in Spain, China, Japan, Singapore and the USA. As reflected in the company’s
maxim "Focus Innovations" WITec’s success is based on introducing new
technologies and a commitment to maintaining customer satisfaction with high-
quality, flexible and empowering products.
Through the past 20 years WITec has established itself as a world-renowned manufacturer
of confocal Raman imaging systems that embody the notion of German quality. Even
WITec’s first production instrument, a Scanning Near-field Optical Microscope
(SNOM/NSOM), continues to provide dependable, effective service. Dr. Julio Soares, Senior
Research Scientist at the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory, University of Illinois
in Urbana-Champaign, says: “We are proud to be part of the history of WITec instruments by
housing the very first of the WITec NSOM to be sold and that our laboratory helped on the
further development of that instrument at the time. I think the fact the serial number one
instrument is still running without hardly needing any technical support is an achievement in
itself.”
Dr. Olaf Hollricher, Director of Research & Development at WITec, says: “Remembering the
history of Raman imaging in general and that of WITec in particular, the terms innovation and
development come to my mind first. The past 20 years have brought incredible technological
advances in Raman analysis. And this development has affected the analysis of many
materials, ranging from semiconductors to textile fibers to cancer cells. We always pushed
on development of new concepts of Raman imaging and techniques, for which we were
recognized with numerous awards.”
From the beginning, WITec’s Raman microscopes have always been extremely fast, with
integration times in the range of milliseconds per pixel. Back in the late 90s, integration times
used to be one minute per pixel – thus WITec customers could measure far quicker than
ever before. All WITec Raman imaging systems use the spectral information of a sample to
produce an image that visualizes its chemical composition and structure. WITec was also the
first to offer combined microscopes that allow for imaging of a sample with several
microscopy.