3D Nanoprinting via Focused Electron Beams: A Perspective

During the past years, controlled 3D nanofabrication via focused electron beam induced deposition (FEBID) has madetremendous progress. While originally demonstrated around the millennium and explored in slight more detail about5 years later, the full exploitation of that approach started around 2015. During that 10 years ‘break’, the joint effortsof the related community built up a deeper fundamental process understanding, which, together with new technicalpossibilities, laid the foundation for the successful revisit of true 3D nanofabrication, currently being one of the uniqueselling points of FEBID. During the past 7 years, further research was conducted by a number of research groupsworldwide, which crucially improved the process understanding and impacted predictability, accuracy and reliability.That leveraged 3D-FEBID more and more into the status of a true 3D nanoprinting technology, which currently isbarely surpassed by any other technology with the exception of its ion-beam sibling (focused ion beam induced deposition– FIBID). Although 3D FEBID is well matured so far, there are remaining questions, challenges and even cleardemands to exploit the full potential of that approach for advanced applications in research and development beyondcurrent possibilities.