Never say FIB, never abbreviate, always write out “focused ion beam”

After Café: Strategies for Better Cross-Sectional Imaging – Edge Cleaving or FIB? at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qjifh7J4Wos

Bangzhi Liu, Thank you for sharing these examples. It seems that human manual methods – cleaving with tweezers, pressing and heating, might have reached their limit. The results become more complex to evaluate, and corrections almost not possible at all. I am certain that picometer control is possible and practical in the future. Abandoning completely any human controlled steps. Even to the point all data and models are handled by machine learning. Automated testing inside the loop, letting machine algorithms do the experiments, gain the experience, store the memories of what works, and evaluate the economics, process time — and end to end optimization. For that matter such things could go to “fabricate and use”, not remote specialized groups.

I wish I were 60 years younger and knew what I spent a lifetime learning. So many interesting things to investigate. All I can think to do is work on much larger devices where the power requirements (MegaWatt, GigaWatt) mean the pieces are larger than today’s scale, less expensive to build and more forgiving of manual (human in the loop) methods.

Filed as (Never say FIB, never abbreviate, always write out “focused ion beam” )

Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation