SBIR-STTR Award

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will demonstrate the scientific and technical feasibility of introducing optical processing into conventional scanning electron microscopes (SEM). The addition of localized and site specific high photon flux offers the opportunity to enable a variety of novel patterned materials processing options in these tools, including enhanced deposition and etch processes at the nanometer scale. The broader impact of this project opens up a broad array of new applications in areas such as biology, medicine and nanotechnology.

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project aims to develop a platform for photon beam enhanced and electron beam induced nanoscale processing. Focused electron beam induced processing is a nanoscale process generally capable of about 10nm resolution and 1nm has been demonstrated. However, materials deposited via focused nanoscale electron beam induced deposition (EBID) contain significant amounts of residual contamination due to insufficient by-product desorption from the precursor molecules. In addition, electron beam induced etching (EBIE) is typically limited by desorption of the resultant electron beam induced etch product, thus is prohibitively slow. This project will address these limitations by developing an instrument capable of delivering a pulsed photon beam to facilitate desorption of contaminate by-products for the EBID process, and accelerate desorption of etch products during the EBIE process. The objective is to design and construct a platform capable of precise delivery of photons over a broad spectroscopic range for nanoscale processing and simultaneous microscale imaging in standard scanning electron microscopes (SEM) or dual ion and electron beam systems. Finally, requisite pulsed electron-photon-mass transport synchronization strategies will be developed for advanced nanoscale prototyping, editing, and sample preparation. The broader/commercial impact of this project will be the development of a new tool to enable improved rapid prototyping of nanoscale devices by offering a cost-effective solution for nanoscale synthesis compatible with widespread SEM and dual beam platforms. This will accelerate the research efforts on next generation nanoscale devices with new and/or enhanced functionality, which is expected to benefit many facets of society ranging from physical to life sciences. This project may also improve the understanding of critical photon-electron-substrate-vapor interactions which will ultimately lead to a directed assembly approach capable of depositing 3-dimensional, complex and multi-component materials with nanometer scale lateral resolution and atomic scale z-dimensional control