Advances in technology are continually producing smaller and more sophisticated devices. Just earlier this week doctors implanted the world’s smallest cardiac pacemaker, which is comparable to the size of a large vitamin.
Another first recently revealed was the world’s smallest comic strip, and while this story carries less impact, it does playfully exemplify just how small things are getting.
The comic was released as a promotion for EHSM, a DIY and open-source conference in Hamburg founded by Sébastien Bourdeauducq.
“In August 2011, I found that many projects involving difficult fields (vacuum engineering, chip design, advanced signal processing, complex RF engineering) were not fairly represented in the hacker/maker movement, despite the relative openness and diversity of the latter,” explains Bourdeauducq. “So I founded a conference focusing on the outer reaches of DIY and open source.”
The conference will take place from June 27th to 29th at DESY, Europe’s second largest particle physics laboratory. “We want to provide a place to showcase and discover exciting projects, and a meeting point for everyone who is interested in the frontiers of open source and DIY,” adds Bourdeauducq, who will be showcasing the comic at the event as an example of what microfabrication makes possible.
“Today, microfabrication is everywhere, in the chips that power our computers and handle our communications,” he adds, “but few people have any idea how they might be built.”
Titled Juana Knits the Planet, the comic includes 12 frames, each at a width of around 25 micrometers. Using a focused ion beam (FIB) machine, the story was etched into the hair using a high-speed jet of matter, similar to a fine laser-beam.
While FIB machines aren’t new, technological advances such as high vacuum technology, ion optics, and liquid metal ion sources were needed in order for this tiny comic to come to life.
The most difficult aspect of creating the world’s smallest comic, however, was gaining access to the proper equipment.
“There [was] quite some competition for [the machine], and in some of the labs we contacted (who ended up not doing it), a regrettable academic ‘ivory tower’ attitude.”
The etching itself was quite easy and took less than 2 hours of work, although the hair did prove to be a fickle medium.
“One technical problem we had was that hair is a good electrical insulator, so as we bombarded it with ions, it retained an electric charge that deflected the ion beam and made the etching impossible,” says Bourdeauducq. “This was quickly solved by coating the hair with a very fine conductive layer of metal prior to the etching.”
But why hair? “Because it is something that people can easily relate too, and that they see is small,” adds Bourdeauducq, “even though microfabrication technology can etch things much finer.”
For more information, visit https://ehsm.eu.