Leica Microsystems
| Leica Microsystems GmbH
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| legal form | GmbH |
| founding | 1997 |
| Seat | Wetzlar , Germany |
| management | Markus Lusser (since 2015), President |
| Number of employees | worldwide> 4,000 (2008) |
| sales | > $ 1 billion (2008) |
| Branch | Precision mechanical and optical industry, optics, medical technology, measurement technology |
| Website | www.leica-microsystems.com |
Leica Microsystems is a German manufacturer of light microscopes , devices for the creation of microscopic specimens and related products. The company has ten production facilities in eight countries and sales and service organizations in 19 countries. Contract partners take over sales in over 100 other countries.
Leica Microsystems emerged in 1997 as one of three successor companies from the Leitz company founded in 1869 by Ernst Leitz in Wetzlar.
history
The history of the predecessor company Leitz is largely presented in the article there. In the early 1970s, a cooperation developed between Leitz and the Swiss optics company Wild Heerbrugg , which led to the foundation of the Wild Leitz Group in 1986. In 1990 there was another merger with the Cambridge Instruments Group, which in addition to Cambridge Instruments itself included the Heidelberg microtome manufacturer Jung, the Viennese optics manufacturer Reichert and the microscopy divisions of the North American optics companies Bausch & Lomb and American Optical and thus the entire North American microscope industry.
In 1997 the Leica Group was split into three independent companies. In addition to Leica Microsystems, Leica Camera and Leica Geosystems were created . After a good seven years in the ownership of the investment company Permira , Leica Microsystems was bought by the US Danaher Corporation in July 2005 .
Leica Microsystems and its predecessor company received the innovation award of the German economy three times , the first time in 1984 for the ELSAM acoustical microscope. This device sent ultrasonic pulses in the ten megahertz to two gigahertz frequency range and received their reflex echoes. The echoes were then converted into video signals and made visible as pixels on a monitor, similar to what happens with a normal ultrasound device . In the meantime, however, Leica has stopped selling acousto microscopes. The two other prizes were won in 2002 for the DUV lens for photomask and wafer production and in 2005 for the Leica TCS 4PI fluorescence microscope, the commercial version of the 4Pi microscope .
Technologies and Products
Light microscopy
Light microscopy is still one of the company's main focuses. The spectrum ranges from comparatively simple stereo microscopes and course microscopes to high-end research microscopes, for which there are only three competitors worldwide ( Nikon , Olympus and Zeiss ). In addition to conventional light microscopes, research microscopes also include various types of laser scanning microscopes , namely confocal laser scanning microscopes based on the point scanner principle and the STED microscopes commercialized by Leica . With this type of microscope, which is based on research work by Stefan Hell and co-workers, the Abbe 's resolution limit can be circumvented so that structures can be represented in three dimensions with greater detail sharpness and an increase in structural information. In October 2014, Stefan Hell was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on STED .
Leica offers various camera systems as accessories for conventional microscopes, and software for image analysis is also part of the program, including for cytogenetic research to localize genes.
Special light microscopic optics are used in wafer and photo mask testing. The miniaturized structures on wafers and chips can only be imaged with deep ultraviolet light at a wavelength of 248 nanometers or less. The cement used between the individual lenses in conventional lenses can only withstand the ultraviolet light for a limited time and becomes cloudy - the lens must be replaced. In 2001, Leica Microsystems developed a lens for these applications that does not require any cement and therefore has no limited service life (DUV lens in "Airspace Technology"). This development was awarded the German Business Innovation Prize in the SME category in 2002.
Cutting and dyeing
Leica Microsystems (Leica Biosystems in Nussloch ) is a manufacturer of various systems for histology and pathology . With microtome and cryostat thin sections are made of biological tissue and then with special dyes stained, for example, to make visible to benign or malignant tissue changes. In 2003, Leica launched the first fully automatic staining station for tissue samples, a flexible solution for cytology and pathology laboratories. Microtomes are also used in industry for cutting plastics, foils or injection molded parts, car sheets, leather, food and other things.
One of the first ultramicrotomes was developed by Hellmuth Sitte in Vienna to produce ultra-thin sections for electron microscopy and has been produced by Leica since the 1950s. To this day, the Vienna division is the world market leader in sample preparation for transmission electron microscopy .
literature
- Rolf Beck: The Leitz works in Wetzlar. 2nd Edition. Sutton Verlag, Erfurt 1999, ISBN 3-89702-124-2 ( The archive images series ).
- Rolf Beck: microscopes from Ernst Leitz in Wetzlar. Sutton Verlag, Erfurt 2002, ISBN 3-89702-292-3 ( The archive images series ).
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Leica Geosystems website
- ↑ Imprint . Leica Microsystems; accessed on October 15, 2014
- ↑ a b Rsr: Leica Microsystems reports record sales for 2008 . In: Gießener Anzeiger . April 2, 2009.
- ↑ The TCS STED has been on the market since 2007 and delivers a resolution below 100 nm. The TCS STED CW has been available with a resolution below 80 nm since 2009 .
- ↑ Mittelhessen.de
Coordinates: 50 ° 33 '7.2 " N , 8 ° 29" 52.2 " E