nanofabrication

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

the design and manufacture of devices and structures with dimensions in the nanometre range, encompassing both top-down approaches — which use lithographic, etching, and deposition techniques to pattern features into material surfaces at ever-smaller scales — and bottom-up approaches — which build nanostructures from atomic and molecular components through self-assembly, chemical synthesis, or atom-by-atom placement using scanning probe instruments; top-down nanofabrication is the basis of modern semiconductor device manufacturing, which produces integrated circuits with transistor feature sizes below 5 nanometres using extreme ultraviolet lithography; bottom-up nanofabrication includes DNA origami, block copolymer directed self-assembly, and molecular beam epitaxy; hybrid approaches combine top-down patterning with bottom-up self-assembly to achieve features beyond the limits of purely lithographic methods

Examples

• Extreme ultraviolet lithography enables nanofabrication of transistors smaller than a virus.
• Nanofabrication using focused ion beams allows researchers to sculpt individual nanostructures from bulk material.