QuantumATK - About Us

From QuantumWise to QuantumATK

The Short Story

The QuantumATK team at Synopsys develops the QuantumATK simulation tool for fast and reliable atomic-scale modeling of nanostructure. QuantumATK is fully supported and delivered in an easy-to-use interface, tailored from state-of-the-art methods, and developed by experts to the specifications of our customers.

Who We Are

The QuantumATK team are former employees of QuantumWise which was acquired by Synopsys Inc. in 2017. QuantumWise was started in 2008 and built on the technology developed by the company Atomistix (founded in 2003). At present, the QuantumATK team are part of Synopsys TCAD and has more than 30 employees, working with developing the QuantumATK code and supporting the users. Most of the employees have a Ph.D. in physics or chemistry, and/or are seasoned programmers with long experience in numerical modeling and GUI development.

Our Aim and Philosophy

We position ourselves as a facilitator by interacting with both the research community to extract the latest state-of-the-art methods and techniques, and with researchers in companies and universities that seek to utilize these tools. We strive to deliver these advanced numerical tools in an easy-to-use package. Our primary aim is to make the latest developments within atomic-scale modeling available to enable technologists to solve real life problems within the materials and semiconductor industry. 

Unlike most other commercial companies offering software for atomic-scale modeling, we develop our own code from the bottom up, and we have the in-house expertise to develop novel functionality all the way down to the quantum-mechanical level. Our software is a constant work in progress, and our development is test-driven and guided by customer requests and requirements. We spend a lot of energy on ensuring the quality and reliability of the software.

Our code base is very flexible and can easily be tailored for customized solutions, including very advanced ones, in order to study problems for which there are currently no software tools available on the market, and/or to fit a particular customer's specific requirements.

We place great emphasis on making the code easy to use, and on helping our customers to be successful with atomic-scale modeling. When you are dealing with us, you will always meet people who know what they are talking about, who are happy to do their work, and who are passionate about helping you to be successful with using atomic-scale modelling. We have a large amount of tutorials available online, including videos on our website and YouTube, and we have a very active community of users with whom we interact constantly.

Can We Help You Solve a Problem?

If you have any questions related to our products or company, please get in touch with us, as we would love to hear from you! Requests and feedback from our customers is what helps us evolve our products.

What Customers Say About Us and Our Products

“My group is working directly with some of world’s largest semiconductor manufacturers in Asia and North America  to explore design issues for transistors and metal interconnects, the switches and wiring in modern electronic circuits.

Commercial electronic products are being manufactured at  nanometer length scales, and technologies in development are currently being scaled to below 10 nm. At these dimensions, transistor channels and nanowire interconnects are only a few hundred atoms wide. QuantumATK  from the Synopsys QuantumATK Team has proven to be an integral part of our studies, allowing us to explore at the atomistic level the nanostructures that are directly relevant to nano-electronic technology design.

With QuantumATK, we are able to explore electronic structure and current flows in devices enabling us to understand the impact of increased surface-to-volume ratio and the effects of quantum confinement on band structures. We have worked directly with the QuantumATK team to demonstrate new device behavior that can be used to engineer novel nanotransistor designs. Our team finds QuantumATK both easy to use and flexible and importantly, the Synopsys QuantumATK Team is extremely responsive and committed to providing the tools we need to solve our technology problems.”

Prof. Jim Greer | University of Nottingham, Ningbo China campus

“I started experimenting with ATK-VNL [QuantumATK package including NanoLab]  over 6 years ago for computing IV characteristics in simple graphene-based devices, and I must say that the platform has come of age since. It has become a must-use tool for our rapid prototyping of conventional and unconventional electronic/optical transport nano-devices, and for training students and postdocs on the foundations and challenges of band structure, transmission spectra, conductance, and tunneling current/voltage properties using first-principles quantum mechanics methods. The convenience of the single entry VNL [NanoLab] platform to design, build, launch calculations, and characterize molecular systems using intuitive workflows and analysis tools is terrific once you’re familiar with it! We’re now looking forward to expanding its use in multiscale coupled calculations involving the recently integrated classically approximated potentials (force fields) - including our own group's reactive force field method, ReaxFF. On a final note, I must say that the team at QuantumWise [Synopsys QuantumATK Team]  have always been very receptive to our suggestions and diligent in providing useful feedback to our many technical queries; which speaks to their commitment towards developing a unique, user-friendly, application-driven computational chemistry platform.”

Dr. Andres Jaramillo-Botero | California Institute of Technology | 2015

"QuantumATK  together with NanoLab  is an outstanding package opening the possibility to gain insights in the design and understanding of spintronic devices by including non-collinear spin options and spin-orbit interactions in the transport calculations."

Latest publication with QuantumATK: A.C. Aragonès. N. Darwish, S. Ciampi, L. Jiang, R. Roesch, E. Ruiz, C. A. Nijhuis, and I. Diez-Pérez, “Control over Near-Ballistic Electron Transport through Formation of Parallel Pathways in a Single-Molecule Wire”, J. Am. Chem. Soc.141, 240 (2019).

Dr. Eliseo Ruiz | University of Barcelona

“QuantumWise [Synopsys QuantumATK Team] has managed the tour-de-force of blending high performance material modeling techniques (combining solid state physics, chemistry and molecular dynamics) with user-friendliness. This opens the way to users, interested in but not comfortable with material modeling techniques to gain quite easily insights into the properties of matters.

The benefit of this package does not stop there, since the flexibility of both their graphical interface (VNL) [NanoLab]  and of their NanoLanguage are also very much suited for advanced users, where automation of tasks is often very much needed. For instance, once properly interfaced with the NanoLanguage, repetitive actions (convergence tests, geometry relaxation, ...) can be fully automated, freeing time to focus on the analysis of results instead of on task.

Further, the combination of the non-equilibrium Green's function formalism with density functional theory has proved to be useful to understand the relation between material interfacial properties and the performances of nanoscaled electronic devices by quantifying, for example, their electron tunneling process, contact resistance, ...

So, to the QuantumWise team [Synopsys QuantumATK Team] : please, continue, you are on the right track. “

Dr. Geoffrey Pourtois

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Interested in applying QuantumATK software to your research? Test our software or contact us at quantumatk@synopsys.com to get more information on QuantumATK platform for atomic-scale modeling.