A Hybrid Nanorobotic Manipulation Platform: A Sharing Holder between a Cs-TEM and an SEM for Micro to Sub-nanometer Fabrication

Nanorobotic manipulation inside a transmission electron microscope (TEM) and a scanning electron microscope (SEM) has been developed independently with TEM emphasizing the high resolution whereas the SEM focuses on more complex processes using for example multiple probes and taking the advantage of electron beams or focused ion beams (FIB) for nanofabrication and assembly. A merged platform by combining them together is highly demanded for complicated device-level prototyping and characterization. Here we report an advanced hybrid nanorobotic manipulation system with a holder compatible to both a dual-beam SEM with a FIB and electron-beam lithography (EBL) and a spherical aberration corrected (Cs) TEM. Together with multiple nanorobotic manipulators pre-installed inside the SEM, this sharing holder contains a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) as a positioning stage that can work with the TEM, hence highly complex and precise manipulation is achieved in a combined platform. Furthermore, the holder has a variety of physical stimuli integrated with TEM-compatible chips, which greatly expand the application scenarios of the two platforms. The fabrication of a nano-bioelectrical probe is taken as an example to demonstrate the advantages of this system in terms of task complexity, operational accuracy, and efficiency.