Ion beam

There are many ion beam sources, some derived from the mercury vapor thrusters developed by NASA in the 1960s.

The use of eV is convenient for converting between voltage and energy, especially when dealing with singly charged ion beams.

that can be accelerated using a gridded ion source is limited by the space charge effect, which is described by Child's law:

The wafer is developed, and for a positive photoresist, the exposed portions are removed in a chemical process.

The impact of the ions erodes the target, abrading away the areas not covered by the photoresist.

Focused ion beam (FIB) instruments have numerous applications for characterization of thin-film devices.

The most common application is to verify the integrity of the gate oxide layer in a CMOS transistor.

A single excavation site exposes a cross section for analysis using a scanning electron microscope.

Dual excavations on either side of a thin lamella bridge are utilized for preparing transmission electron microscope samples.

[2] Another common use of FIB instruments is for design verification and/or failure analysis of semiconductor devices.

Engineering prototype devices may be modified using the ion beam in combination with gas-assisted material deposition in order to rewire an integrated circuit's conductive pathways.

For example sputtering techniques can be used for surface analysis or depth profiling by performing secondary ion mass spectrometry.

[2] In difference to secondary ion spectroscopy scattering based techniques like RBS are often less destructive to the sample.

In radiobiology a broad or focused ion beam is used to study mechanisms of inter- and intra- cellular communication, signal transduction and DNA damage and repair.

This innovative propulsion technique named Ion Beam Shepherd has been shown to be effective in the area of active space debris removal as well as asteroid deflection.

Electron beam weapons were tested by the U.S. Navy in the early 20th century[citation needed], but the hose instability effect prevents them from being accurate at a distance of over approximately 30 inches.