Zurich Instruments AG

Zurich Instruments, the first spin-off company of BEL, has been founded on April 3^rd, 2008 in Zurich by two BEL collaborators, Dr. Sadik Hafizovic and Dr. Flavio Heer.

Zurich Instruments AG develops and markets high-tech measurement instrumentation. Their products include lock-in amplifiers, arbitrary waveform generators, impedance analyzers, phase-locked loops, digitizers, boxcar averagers, and quantum computing control systems. The offered instruments deliver market-leading specifications for sensitivity, dynamic range, feature set, speed, and accuracy. Zurich Instruments is headquartered in Zurich. The company was acquired in 2021 and is now fully owned by external page Rohde & Schwarz, a Germany-based multinational electronics supplier.

The foundational technology was developed at BEL, ETH Zurich, during a collaborative interdisciplinary project, which was started in 2004. The project required the recovery of minute signals in an extremely noisy environment in single-cell impedance measurements, which was not possible using commercially available instrumentation. Therefore, digital multi-frequency lock-in amplifier technology was devised in the course of the project. The performance of the respective digital lock-in amplifiers was outstanding and triggered further intensive research and development, which provided the basis of the technology of Zurich Instruments.

The company integrates state-of-the-art analog electronics, high-precision digital signal processing, innovative software, and intuitive user interfaces into a line of instruments guided by lean design principles. System integration leads to reduced setup complexity, more efficient workflows, better time allocation, and more reliable measurements. The products serve needs in the fields of electrical engineering, physics and communication, quantum computing, quantum sensing, medical instrumentation for high-resolution magnetic-resonance imaging, and bioimpedance measurements in the life sciences.