etching

Harvesting the components and etching a fresh board seems to be a time-effective and more robust solution.

Some of these are physical (laser etching instead of dye printing) and some are internal controls.

So the conference choose to dismiss one of the top selections, meaning knowledge so etching perceived as good won't be shared.

But with the camera you have control over the lighting, and can move the lighting such that the etching has more contrast.

Chemicals are different, structures are different, design is different (cmos), etching equipment is different.

Pretty sure you could make your own with a 3d printer and one of those kitchen PCB-etching setups you see people using.

Acids and etching solutions have been used to do this for many years.

What they actually developed was a novel resin and a method for etching 9nm dots in it using a specific optical laser setup.

You need a special laser to do the physical etching that they're doing.

Wouldn't it be harder to try to get a good picture of the chip in such an angle that you could read the etching?

The article mentions itself that we use light for etching features even less than the wavelength of the light nowadays.

I'm sure they'll figure out an etching pattern that is both extremely lipophobic and hydrophobic.

But the process to create the etching takes an hour for a 1" x 1" square.

Since the etching time cannot be controlled in this batch (from 5 mins to 30 mins), this may suggests that the "ITO glasses" are not the same.

Since the word "etch" is mentioned, my guess is that the team was performing some kind of IC fabrication process (or some thing similar), possibly involving Reactive Ion Etching.

By "tools", I really mean huge pieces of instrumentation that cost many (tens to hundreds) millions of dollars from other companies that are used for the various processing steps (deposition/growth of materials on wafers, patterning resists, etching, etc).