Atomistix

» see atomistix.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Some software never has a price on its page, and Atomistix was that kind. You met it because your department held a license, or you did not meet it at all. My own work sits in computer engineering and it has never touched this corner of it: the people who bought Atomistix ToolKit were modeling how electrons move through structures a few atoms wide, which is a different building entirely.

The Danish company register has the facts in their driest available form. ATOMISTIX A/S, CVR 27437346, registered on 22 October 2003 at Juliane Maries Vej 30 in Copenhagen, care of the Niels Bohr Institute in the Rockefeller complex. Industry code 721900, other research and experimental development within natural science and engineering. Kurt Stokbro founded it that October with Jeremy Taylor and Thomas Magnussen.

The products were Atomistix ToolKit and Atomistix Virtual NanoLab. ToolKit was the engine, a successor to TranSIESTA-C, and it combined density functional theory with non-equilibrium Green's functions so a researcher could compute what happens when current is driven through an electrode-nanostructure-electrode sandwich under bias. Virtual NanoLab was the interface over the top, described in the company's own language as mimicking in silico the approach of an experiment in a real laboratory. The scripting layer was Python, branded as NanoLanguage.

By 2007 there were fifty people and sales offices in Singapore and California. By 2008 there were twenty. In September 2008 the company went bankrupt.

~ the record ~

~ the estate sale ~

In December 2008 a newly formed company called QuantumWise announced it had acquired all assets from the Atomistix estate, and the chief executive of QuantumWise was Kurt Stokbro, who had founded Atomistix five years earlier. AZoNano quoted him at the end of January 2009 saying the new company was profitable from its first day and had hired six people. The same piece describes QuantumWise as a start-up born at the Nano-Science Center and the E-Science Center at Copenhagen University.

The software itself carried on, keeping its version numbers under the new owner. Synopsys bought QuantumWise in 2017 and the product sells today as QuantumATK. What ended in September 2008 was the company around it: fifty employees and two foreign sales offices, replaced by six people selling the same code.

~ what the register says ~

The bankruptcy was September 2008 and the file stayed open until 11 January 2012, which is the date the register gives as the company's end. Three and a bit years between the two is nothing unusual for a bankruptcy estate, and it is why you can find sources putting Atomistix's death in 2012. Both dates are real. One is when the work stopped and the other is when the paperwork did.

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