Park Systems Brand Guidelines: A Stanford AFM Lineage, From PSIA to Gwacheon

A Quate student, a Silicon Valley firm and a second start.

Park Systems traces its roots to the laboratory where the atomic force microscope was first made to work. English Wikipedia says its founder, Sang-il Park, was a doctoral student of Professor Calvin Quate at Stanford University, and that in 1986, while Park was in Quate’s lab, Quate, Gerd Binnig and Christoph Gerber achieved the first experimental implementation of atomic force microscopy. The company’s own history puts it more directly: Park, it says, “contributes to the invention of AFM at Stanford.”

After Stanford, Park founded Park Scientific Instruments (PSI) in 1988, a Silicon Valley maker of atomic force microscopes, according to English Wikipedia, which says he sold PSI to Thermo Electron and returned to South Korea in 1997. That earlier American company is a separate business from today’s Park Systems.

The Korean company was founded on 7 April 1997 as PSIA. English Wikipedia says the “A” stood for “Advanced,” signalling the aim of building more advanced technology than PSI, and that in its early days PSIA sold imported PSI products before it began developing and manufacturing atomic force microscopes of its own. In 2002 it released the XE-100, which Wikipedia describes as the first research AFM made in Korea. In 2006 it moved its headquarters to the Korea Advanced Nano Fab Center, and on 6 April 2007, after its tenth anniversary, PSIA changed its name to Park Systems, putting the founder’s surname on the door.

Park has stayed at the head of the business: trade press in 2022 and 2023 quoted him as the company’s founder and chief executive.

Non-contact scanning, chip fabs and a stock listing.

Park Systems sells atomic force microscopes to research labs and to factories. English Wikipedia says its instruments use a decoupled flexure scanner, in which an XY scanner moves the sample sideways while a separate Z scanner moves the probe up and down, and that they can run in a non-contact mode the company markets as “True Non-Contact,” in which the tip does not touch the sample surface. The company dates the introduction of that technology to its founding year, 1997.

Its website divides the range into research instruments, from small-sample to large-sample systems under names such as NX20 and FX40, and industrial systems for wafer processing, photomask repair, advanced packaging and flat-panel displays. The company says it moved into industrial AFM in the 2000s, when its systems were adopted by semiconductor fabs. In 2010, Wikipedia says, its industrial AFM technology was designated a National Core Technology by the South Korean government.

Semiconductor work also shaped its partnerships. On 23 March 2015 Park Systems and the Belgian research centre imec launched a joint development project on industrial AFM for chip manufacturing, and a second followed on 17 February 2020, according to English Wikipedia. On 17 December 2015 the company listed on Korea’s KOSDAQ market, a date its own investor pages also give.

The company says it was named to Forbes Asia’s “Best Under a Billion” list in 2020, and it calls itself the world’s number one AFM provider, citing a 2024 report by the research firm MarketsandMarkets. It says it now works in more than 70 countries through 16 regional offices.

Design and documentation.

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.

Beyond the microscope, and into its own building.

For its first 25 years Park Systems grew without buying other companies. That changed in September 2022, when it announced the purchase of Accurion GmbH of Göttingen, a maker of imaging spectroscopic ellipsometers and active vibration isolation systems that began as a spin-off from the Max Planck Institute for biophysical chemistry, R&D World and Silicon Semiconductor reported. “This is Park’s very first business acquisition in the company’s history,” Sang-il Park said; financial details were not disclosed. In early 2025 it added Lyncée Tec, a Swiss maker of digital holographic microscopes, according to English Wikipedia. The company now presents itself as a broader nanometrology business, listing ellipsometers, white-light interferometers, nanoscale infrared spectrometers and vibration isolation alongside its AFMs.

Its home changed too. English Wikipedia still gives Suwon as the headquarters, and Evertiq reported in September 2023 that the company had been expanding its leased space there. On 15 September 2023 it broke ground on a headquarters of its own in Gwacheon, Gyeonggi Province, with Park saying that after 26 years of leasing the company would now have “its own office building,” Evertiq reported. In March 2026 the building was completed, with a total floor area of 27,052 square metres in Gwacheon Knowledge Information Town, The Financial News of Seoul reported in April 2026, adding that the company planned to use the expanded production capacity there to meet AFM orders. A further site in the Yongin Semiconductor Cluster is planned, with the start of construction still being timed, the same report said.

The company’s public material follows its customers: application pages for semiconductors, polymers, thin films, life sciences and 2D materials, an image gallery, webinars, and its own NANOscientific symposium series, all listed on its website.

For a design guide, Park Systems shows how a founder’s name and a laboratory technique can grow into an industrial brand. Compare Nanosurf, a Swiss AFM maker founded the same year, and the instrument group Bruker. For this guide we use a deep navy, a cool blue and a pale grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Park Systems’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.