This award will support ten U.S. participants in a joint U.S.- Japan seminar on the subject of high resolution focused ion beams (FIB), a field which has developed primarily in the United States and Japan. FIB technology has been applied to integrated circuit fabrication, mask repair, and surface analysis. It has potential applications in low-energy implantation during molecular beam epitaxy and in nanostructure fabrication. Focused ion beams produced with field-ionization- type sources can have large current densities with small beam sizes. Such beams can be used to alter surfaces in a variety of ways, including micromachining, implantation, and deposition. The applications of focused ion beams to integrated circuit fabrication include (1) direct, maskless, resistless implantation of dopants in Si or GaAs, (2) micromachining or ion milling, (3) ion beam lithography, (4) ion-assisted etching or deposition, (5) microanalysis, and (6) scanning ion microscopy. Because of the significant technological promise of the field, as well as its potential application to the study of basic scientific problems in electronic materials, the seminar organizers believe the time is opportune for the convening of this workshop. It will bring many of the main workers in FIB together to exchange and discuss their recent research results and to consider possible joint research projects. The directions of research in FIB technology are somewhat different in the U.S. and Japan, and the seminar will thus allow workers from complementary areas in the two countries to compare results. Both the U.S. and Japan should benefit from such an exchange. A particular effort will be made to ensure attendance by U.S. graduate students. Though there will be some discussion of ion sources and optics at the seminar, the emphasis will be on the novel applications possible only with high resolution focused ion beams. The seminar will be held December 3-6, 1990, in Portland, Oregon. Seminar co-organizers are Dr. Jon Orloff, Oregon Graduate Institute of Science and Technology, and Dr. Kenji Gamo, Department of Electrical Engineering, Osaka University, Japan.
