A state-of-the-art high energy heavy ion microbeam irradiation system is constructed at the Institute of Modern Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. This microbeam system operates in both full current intensity mode and single ion mode. It delivers a predefined number of ions to pre-selected targets for research in biology and material science. The characteristic of this microbeam system is high energy and vertical irradiation. A quadrupole focusing system, in combination with a series of slits, has been designed to optimize the spatial resolution. A symmetrically achromatic system leads the beam downwards and serves simulta-neously as an energy analyzer. A high gradient quadrupole triplet finally focuses a C6+ ion beam to 1 μm in the vacuum chamber within the energy range from 10 MeV/u to 100 MeV/u. In this paper, the IMP microbeam system is described in detail. A systematic investigation of the ion beam optics of this microbeam system is presented together with the associated aberrations. Comparison is made between the IMP microbeam system and the other existing systems to further discuss the performance of this microbeam. Then the optimized initial beam parameters are given for high resolution and high hitting efficiency. At last, the experiment platform is briefly introduced.