EN
Focused ion beam (FIB) has found a steady
and growing use as a tool for fabrication, particularly
in the length-scale of micrometres down to nanometres.
Traditionally more commonly used for materials
characterisation, FIB is continually finding new research
areas in a growing number of laboratories. For example,
over the last ten years the number of FIB instruments in the
U.K. alone has gone from single figures, largely supplied
by a single manufacturer, to many tens of instruments
supplied by several competing manufacturers. Although
the smaller of the two research areas, FIB fabrication
has found itself to be incredibly powerful in the
modification and fabrication of devices for all kinds of
experimentation. Here we report our use of FIB in the
production of Superconducting QUantum Interference
Devices (SQUIDs) and other closely related devices for
metrological applications. This is an area ideally suited
to FIB fabrication as the required precision is very high,
the number of required devices is relatively low, but the
flexibility of using FIB means that a large range of smallbatch,
and often unique, devices can be constructed
quickly and with very short lead times.