attocube Brand Guidelines: A 2001 LMU Spin-Off, a Haar NanoFactory & WITTENSTEIN

A professor, a young physicist and a positioner for the cold.

attocube began in Munich in November 2001 as a spin-off from the Center for NanoScience (CeNS) at Ludwig-Maximilian University (LMU), according to a 2014 case study by Wolfgang Runge of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). Its founders were the physics professor Khaled Karraï and Dirk Haft, who finished his doctorate in physics in Munich in 2001; the company itself describes Haft as Karraï’s PhD student at the time.

The founding idea was a nanopositioner: a very small device for moving a sample in tiny, precise steps that could still work in extreme conditions — at cryogenic temperatures, in ultra-high vacuum and in strong magnetic fields. The KIT study calls those ultra-compact positioners the company’s fundamental innovation. According to Runge, an early signal of demand came from the lab itself, when Haft sold a microscope he had built as a student to an American professor and found that other visitors wanted to buy one too.

The plan won the Munich Business Plan Competition in 2001, which the company calls the springboard for everything that followed, and the start-up was also funded through the Bavarian science ministry’s FLÜGGE programme at LMU, the case study says. attocube describes its beginnings as a “two-man show” with “a large portion of creative playfulness.”

From positioners the company moved into complete instruments. The KIT study says attocube developed scanning probe microscopes for basic and industrial research, then the attoDRY1000, a cryogen-free cooling system, followed by the attoECS line of nanopositioners for industry, released in 2011. Awards came quickly, many listed on the company’s own website: the Bavarian Innovation Award in 2006, the German Founder’s Award in 2008 and Deloitte Fast 50 listings in 2008, 2009 and 2010, which the KIT study also records.

Cryostats, positioners and the NanoFactory.

Today attocube describes its work as precision motion, cryogenic microscopy and nanoscale analytics. Its website groups the range into closed-cycle cryostats, low-temperature and ambient nanopositioners, scanning probe and confocal microscope platforms, and displacement sensors, and lists customers in semiconductor equipment, quantum technology, synchrotrons and research laboratories. The company says it serves more than 4,000 customers in over 40 countries, with sales offices in the United States and a network of distributors.

Part of that range came by acquisition. The KIT case study records that attocube took a majority holding in neaspec, another Munich nanotechnology firm, in 2014; German Wikipedia says the two companies merged under the attocube systems AG name on 4 November 2020. In 2021 WITec of Ulm introduced cryoRaman, a cryogenic Raman microscope it says was developed with attocube, and attocube lists an R&D award for cryoRaman in 2022.

The clearest physical statement of the brand is its headquarters. On 11 October 2018 attocube and neaspec opened the NanoFactory in Haar, near Munich, the innovation news site ioplus.nl reported that month, with about 150 staff moving in and room for up to 300. WITTENSTEIN, which commissioned and owns the building, says it was designed by the Munich architects HENN, with a fourteen-metre glass facade opposite Haar station, a light-filled atrium and a floor-to-ceiling glass wall that looks into the manufacturing area. attocube says all its products are made there.

Design has also been recognised directly. attocube lists an iF Design Award in 2017 for its IDS, and the KIT study says the company won the IVAM Marketing Award in 2013 for a campaign for its attoDRY LAB line, built around the slogan “Cool down. Measure. Publish,” with a design concept that included logo development.

How microscopy makers present themselves.

Microscopy makers sell instruments that most people never see, so their visual language is built from the lab itself. The typical product photograph shows a tall grey or white electron column rising from a chamber, set on a desk beside one or two monitors, often in a clean, evenly lit room with no clutter. The instrument is rarely shown working; instead, the screen beside it carries the result, and that result does much of the branding work.

Those results are the field’s most distinctive images. A scanning electron microscope produces greyscale pictures, and makers and their customers often add false colour afterwards to separate grains, cells or layers. Atomic-force and other scanning-probe instruments render a surface as a height map, frequently shown as a coloured relief or a three-dimensional landscape of nanoscale bumps and pits. Cathodoluminescence and Raman maps add another layer, turning light emitted or scattered by a sample into colour-coded images. Many makers credit these images to the university or institute that made them, which lets the customer’s science stand in for the company’s claims.

People appear mostly as scientists at workstations: a researcher seated at a monitor, a hand loading a sample holder, a small team gathered around a screen. Product names tend to be short and are often set in capitals, while technical sans-serif type and restrained blues, greys and blacks dominate websites and brochures.

Much of the presentation happens in person. Trade-show booths at meetings such as Microscopy & Microanalysis, the European Microscopy Congress (EMC) and the International Microscopy Congress are where new instruments are launched, demonstrated and photographed, and where application notes, webinars and customer publications carry the story the rest of the year.

A lower-case name since 2008.

attocube did not stay independent for long. The KIT case study says the German group WITTENSTEIN AG, which describes itself as a specialist in mechatronic drive technology, had taken 74 percent of the company by September 2008 and raised its share to 100 percent in the 2011/2012 business year. German Wikipedia, citing WITTENSTEIN’s own history, gives the stages as a majority stake in 2008 and a wholly owned subsidiary in 2011, and attocube says it has belonged to the WITTENSTEIN group since 2011. According to the case study, the name has been written “attocube systems AG,” all in lower case, since the 2008 change in shareholding — the spelling the brand uses today.

The founders stayed involved. In April 2016 WITTENSTEIN announced that Haft would join the management board of WITTENSTEIN AG and chair attocube’s supervisory board, that Karraï would stay on as scientific director, and that Martin Zech, who had joined attocube in 2009 and had been its chief technical officer since 2011, would take over as managing director.

The company describes itself as “a leading pioneer for nanotechnology solutions in industry and research,” with a team of about 240 physicists, engineers, software developers and product designers, and says it is certified to ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and ISO 45001; those are its own statements. The line on its website is “explore the smallest dimension.”

For a design guide, attocube shows how a university spin-off can keep a lower-case name and a glass-walled factory at the centre of its identity inside an engineering group. Compare WITec, its partner on cryoRaman, and Nanoscribe, another German nanotechnology maker. For this guide we use a cryogenic blue, deep navy and frost white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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