Accelerate your FIB process with adhesive tape

Standard adhesive tape can help overcome the relatively slow patterning speed of direct FIB milling. While FIB nanofabrication has been proven to offer unique strengths compared to EBL, the patterning process itself takes quite some time. The new “sketch & peel” approach bypasses this throughput limitation: instead of using the ion beam to remove complete areas, isolated metallic structures can be created by milling only the outline of the design elements, then “peeling off” the unwanted gold areas with adhesive tape.

Illustration showing the sketch and peel principle
The principle of sketch&peel

The method was first proposed by Y. Chen et al., which whom we have now published a new application note about the topic. The application note explains the method in detail and also investigates the change in outcome when using different ion species. Download the application note here to learn how simple adhesive tape can help you increase your throughput up to several orders of magnitude compared to usual FIB milling.

Image showing array of bowties with sub-10 nm gaps done with sketch and peel
Array of bowties with sub-10 nm gaps