The art and science of etching, writing, or printing at the microscopic level, where the dimensions of characters are on the order of nanometers (units of 10-9 meters, or millionths of a millimeter). This includes various methods of modifying semiconductor chips at the atomic level for the purpose of fabricating integrated circuits. See Assembler, Nanotechnology.
A small-scale "printing" process in nanotechnology that allows the production of extremely compact circuits.
A collection of techniques used by microchip makers to etch the submicron scale pathways of recent (late 1990s)generations of computer chips. These techniques are more precise than earlier ones, but are merely evolutionary in nature; while they may carve features only a few hundred silicon atoms wide, the result is still ragged and statistical, unlike true bottom-up molecular manufacturing.