IOP Business Start-Up Award: turboTEM

turboTEM is a young company founded in 2022 to bring a number of emerging technologies out of the lab and into the field. Based in Dublin, Ireland, the turboTEM team develops a range of cost-effective modular and retrofittable upgrades to expand the performance, flexibility or usable service life of electron microscopes.

The goals of the company are threefold; excellence, accessibility and democratisation. Excellence because each product/research project seeks to add to the performance or power of existing electron microscopes. Accessibility because the team believes that retrofitting users' existing instruments is a more cost-effective and sustainable approach to hardware deployment. And democratisation because turboTEM's modular cross-platform innovations seek to disrupt the tight grip of the current handful of manufacturers.

turboTEM's first product to reach market is the Pulse digital electron read-out unit. This compact unit is inserted in between a users' electron detector and their acquisition PC. The analogue (and relatively slow) signal from the detector is digitised and electron events are then detected digitally before capture in the software. This upgrade allows users to modernize existing systems, increase sensitivity and image resolution, while retaining their existing hardware and without opening their vacuum chamber.

turboTEM is also developing a world-first adjustable gap pole-piece for the transmission electron microscope. This is analogous to the carousel of objective lenses found on light microscopes but reimagined for the electron microscope. This will remove the expensive and wasteful duplication of needing separate instruments to cover each functionality in a shared research laboratory.