Dow Chemical Company is driving innovations that extract value from the intersection of chemical, physical and biological sciences to help address many of the world's most challenging problems such as the need for clean water, clean energy generation and conservation, and increasing agricultural productivity.
Gregory F. Meyers, Ph.D. is the Group Lead for Corporate R&D at Dow and oversees their global AFM efforts. Dr. Meyers explains why SPIP was the company’s choice in imaging analysis software:
"In 2005 we started a search for third party SPM analysis software. We wanted something that would be flexible enough to natively handle data from other instruments such as stylus profilers. The ability to compare data from several different profiling instruments using the same software analysis package eliminates concerns about the vendor's software. Our clear choice then was SPIP and we signed up 6 users.
Since then we have grown our user base to 14 licenses with full modules on each. Our user base includes members of our global SPM team and others from allied functions. We make extensive use of the tip characterization, 3D visualization, force curve analysis, particle and pore, and roughness analysis modules. We also take advantage of batch processing for higher throughput analysis. The batch processing is very straightforward allowing one to call up almost all of the functions available in the modules and easily arrange them in sequence for automatic analysis and reporting. We also find the movie and time series module useful for making movies of dynamic events.
SPIP has become our go-to 3rd party software analysis choice for SPM (and other) data and image analysis. Product support is quite good with typically less than 24 hour response for help when needed. Also Image Metrology listens to suggestions for improvements or new offerings. SPIP is written by SPMers for SPMers - but does much more than that."