It is a group of structures and methods to produce very small ridges, islands or grooves 20 to 50 times smaller than the smallest dimensions on a commercial integrated circuit, or IC. One nanometer (nm) is roughly the length of 10 hydrogen atoms laid end to end. The smallest dimension in IC production in 2008 is 45 nm (nanometers), although several companies are already producing 22 nm dimensions in the laboratory. Our minimum dimension of the lines is in the range of 2 nm for the line width and the center to center distance (the pitch) between the lines is about 5 nm. The crystal itself does this by using the natural crystal structure of certain perfect crystal surfaces and special processes. The lines have a Line Edge Roughness (LER) that is much smaller than the LER of the narrowest lines and spacings obtained with the best optical lithography. It does not depend on charged particles or light of any type, so its resolution does not have the wavelength limitations of any of the established lithographic methods. It is generally used in conjunction with standard optical lithography to make integrated circuits, field emitting display clusters, superconductors, chemically active surfaces, and other unique structures, and of course the world’s first silicon nanowire quantum transistors that operate at room temperature. The primary difference of the structures of this patent from published work is that the extremely small original surface undulations are greatly amplified in height. Another important part of the patent is a novel "atomic cookie cutter" method that allows extremely regular atomic size "dots" to be produced at a much smaller scale than almost any other method. These stripe and dot surface-amplification modifications greatly expand the field of applications
