Directly compared to photolithography's large area patterning capabilities, e-beam lithography is slow and yet, e-beam instruments can be found in every lab and nanofab in the world.
The secret of the new technology lies in the use of an extremely high-resolution e-beam lithography process that produces super fine nano-sized structures.
Typically, e-beam lithography is used only for research purposes when extremely fine resolutions are needed for minimum feature size (typically, on the order of nanometers).
To overcome these issues, we successfully constructed a photonic metamaterial by e-beam lithography using a precise alignment technique (under 10nm misalignment).