Electron beams boost nanotechnology.

• Position: Miniaturization - Brief Article

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, Calif., has acquired one of the world's finest electron beam lithography systems, one that will allow researchers to work on the submolecular scale. For NASA, this means breakthroughs in miniaturization that could lead to significant reductions in mass and cost of spacecraft to took for traces of life on distant planets. For researchers, it means access to one of just three such systems in the world, and the only one in the public sector devoted to pure research for building the nanoscale devices of the future.

Operated in the Microdevices Laboratory at JPL, it provides a tool for delving into the realm of nanotechnology, where the individual molecules become accessible to electronic probing. "The E-Beam lithography system will allow researchers to work at the equivalent level of nature's biological building blocks, by allowing them to create and research technologies at the cellular and subcellular level," notes Paul Maker, manager of JPL's Electron Beam Lithography Laboratory. (Lithography is the process of printing a pattern onto a surface, such as a silicon chip or a high-resolution film.)

"The E-Beam lithography system is like a very fast, very high-resolution camera, but instead of exposing photo-sensitive film to light, a thin layer of electron-sensitive material is exposed to electrons. Instead of using a shutter that imprints the whole image at once, an intense electron beam focused to a tiny spot is rastered [scanned] over the chip like the beam that...