Hi Brian,
yesterday I sat down with the FIB guy I just met and he went over most of
the instrument and principals, so yes defocusing would help I think. I'm
making 1-50 micron wide channels, but I've heard that corners can cause
pressure drops in fluidic channels (which I aim to make) which can cause
salts and proteins to crystallize and build up potentially even blocking
the channel.

I don't know what undulation 'frequency' would be best, but I figure I
should start by not seeing anything visible at 500X optical magnification,
so what can you resolve at that mag, I'd say ballpark 0.3 microns.


On Mon, Nov 5, 2012 at 3:22 PM, Brian Stahl  wrote:

> Dear Nathan,
>
> I'm not a FIB expert but I have used an FEI Helios Dualbeam a little bit; I
> think you should be able to defocus the ion beam slightly to blur/smooth
> edges during patterning.  I would think that an isotropic chemical etch
> after patterning would also smooth out some edge roughness (potentially at
> the expense of overall resolution).  What feature size are you trying to
> pattern that you're worried about LER?
>
> Best regards,
>
> Brian
>
> --
> Brian C. Stahl
> Graduate Student Researcher
> UCSB Materials Research Laboratory
> brian.stahl@gmail.com / bstahl@mrl.ucsb.edu
> Cell: (805) 748-5839
> Office: MRL 3117A
>
>
> On Sun, Nov 4, 2012 at 3:30 AM, Nathan McCorkle  wrote:
>
> > I am working on microfluidics and have the opportunity to use an older
> FEI
> > FIB. My concern this whole time has been to reduce jagged edges by not
> > using a rastered master, originally I was thinking of building my own
> 405nm
> > laser cutter that wouldn't pulse the beam while it traced my lines.
> >
> > With the FIB I'm thinking I could master gold-sputtered glass or quartz,
> > then do contact lithography. Since the FIB does rastering, I'm again
> > concerned with nanometer jaggies. Is there some way I can blur the
> > lithography step a bit to smooth the edges? Or maybe make features
> smaller
> > than they should be, then chemically etch the master for a brief time?
> >
> > --
> > -Nathan
> > _______________________________________________
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--
-Nathan
_______________________________________________
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