About

FERMIUM

Fermium is the 100th element of the periodic table, named after Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, creator of the first nuclear reactor. Fermium ltd is a Bristol-based high-tech manufacturer of educational equipment in the fields of Material Science, Optics, Electronic engineering, and physics at the broadest.

Our strategy is simple: We target obsolete technology, tear it down to it’s dry and dead bones, then build it back using tech from the next ten years. Speaking about numbers, we aim to at least half the price and twice the performance of competing products. A two-fold performance improvement conquers developed markets.
A two-fold price reduction wins the hearts of emerging markets in Asia, Africa and South America. Our development is bottom-up: you tell us what you always dreamt of, we make it happen.

HISTORY

The company was founded under its Italian branch in 2015. At the time, we were a tiny firm, based on a local hackerspace. Our first instrument to be broadly commercialized was the Hall Effect Apparatus.

The concept was simple: what if every university could demonstrate and experiment with Electron mobility and Hall Effect?

Measuring Electron Mobility is a cute experiment, but it was just a muscle-warmer.

The challenges lied ahead of us: Optics. Optical experiments are bulky, expensive, and impractical.

The reason is, as often happens, down to physics: The wavelength of light is tiny. With red light, at 700nm to 635nm, you need precision micrometric equipment, anti-vibration tables, precision-optics.

Even then, after you get everything right, light has one issue: you often can’t see it. Open a window, and the light of any laser of safe power is going to be obscured.

We’re nothing if not pragmatists: the best way of solving an unsolvable problem is not even trying and doing something else.

And so, we shaded ourselves from visible light, and into the microwaves we went.

At centimetre-sized wavelengths, you’d need to kick the whole table over to achieve a comparable movement to the softest breeze from a distant breath in visible light. Precision micrometric equipment becomes rulers, and optical glass can be replaced with plastics.

Some apparatuses already existed by European and Asian brands. The prices were high, functionality was limited, and the accessories were few.

The instruments were so coarse in their precision that often they’d be barely demonstrative equipment, with no quantitative measurement possible.

Our goals were set:

• Drive down the price two-fold
• Double transmitter and receiver directionality
• Enable quantitative experiments
• Create a platform able to support at least 16 experiments
• Be bold in colours, materials, technology, and beauty of our products

Two years of development culminated in 2019 with the release of the microwave bench set of products and accessories to a limited number of key clients. In 2020 we grew tired of innovating alone. We packed our oscilloscopes, our rivet guns, our drawers of doped Germanium samples, and moved to the UK, in beautiful Bristol.