"Our DIY customers are almost all academic. For government and corporate labs, the cost to assemble and test a system is much greater than the price of a completely assembled and tested system, but we still get a bunch of them upgrading their reaction chambers with our LeakProof seals. For academics, the cost of a graduate student labor is rarely considered: most of us at Atomate have been there, slaving away for hundreds of hours to build something that could be purchased for a couple of thousand dollars. The reason is not necessarily because the professors are cheap; many truly believe that resourcefulness is a very important skill one learns in graduate school.

"Our first product was the LeakProof seal. It came from the knowledge that there are literally tens of thousands (possibly over a hundred thousand) of quartz tube furnaces in academic labs all over the world. And, researchers were having problems because they did not know if their quartz tube reactor had leaks. I am aware of a very famous nanotech group in a prominent university that spent over three weeks investigating their home-built system to find out if the simple O-ring seal between the quartz tube and metal flanges [was working]. We invented the differential seal that completely eliminates this problem. We sell a lot of these devices.

"Atomate started selling specific components because we realized that it is a lot easier to add a component to an existing tool than selling a system that replaces the tool. In fact, we started building systems because new professors who did not have time to build and work out the bugs of a system asked us to build [the tools] for them. Even at that time, we knew that the cost of assembly and test made that business model not so attractive. We did it anyway because it was really fun, and seeing great results from our systems published in top journals was truly rewarding. I think we got carried away in the appeal of selling larger and larger systems although we barely broke even on sales of such systems; cutting-edge research groups need systems with a lot of custom engineering, and custom engineering takes a lot of time, which is expensive.

"We are now seeing a different trend. First, in academia, getting funding, especially for equipment, has become very difficult. It's back to asking your grad students to do a lot of assembly and test work. Most of our customers already have the basics: a tube furnace with mass-flow controllers and a vacuum pump. As research evolves, they need more precise control over the process variables. Some need bubblers, others need a pressure regulator for a reaction chamber or optical ports for in situ measurements, or a remote RF generator to reproduce results recently achieved by a famous research group.

"Second, over our many years of experience growing nanostructures in our systems, we've built a considerable core competence in the process. We can now leverage this to build more profitable systems for corporate labs that need systems that can handle wafer processing. There is tremendous value that our team adds. Not many nanotech companies can boast a PhD from Harvard’s Charles Lieber Group, a PhD from Stanford who post-doc'ed with Rick Smalley at Rice (who also worked on the original HiPCO [high-pressure carbon monoxide] process), a PhD from MIT who also worked at Samsung R&D center, and a PhD from Cornell who created NASA-JPL-Caltech nanotube devices group.

"Atomate has primarily science and engineering folks here, so we stick to simple business models. We can design components that we know nanotech researchers need that are not sold by other manufacturers. If it is a clever invention like the LeakProof seal, we patent it so that it won't readily be copied. We purchase these in reasonable volume to get our pricing down so that we can make enough margin to stay in business. Our prices to customers are competitive with getting a set made by a machine shop. We know that it is easier to get approval from a professor to purchase a commercially proven design that is only about 15% more expensive than getting something like this made at a local machine shop, not counting time and effort to draw the parts and make sure that it has the right geometry.

"We're cooking up some really cool stuff here...."