An ion beam is a stream of charged particles, which has many uses in electronics manufacturing (principally ion implantation) and other industries. Today's ion beam sources are typically derived from the mercury vapor thrusters developed by NASA in the 1960s.

One type of ion beam source is the duoplasmatron. Ion beams can be used for sputtering or ion beam etching and for ion beam analysis.

In Science Fiction, ion beams are often used as weapons (an example of this is the Ion Cannon Frigate of Homeworld), damaging the target through both the kinetic energy of the ions and the electrical discharge.

Ion beam etching or Sputtering

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Ion beam etching, or sputtering, is a technique conceptually similar to sandblasting, but using individual atoms in an ion beam to ablate a target. Reactive ion etching is an important extension which uses chemical reactivity to enhance the physical sputtering effect.

In a typical use in semiconductor manufacturing, a mask is used to expose a layer of photoresist on a substrate such as a silicon dioxide or gallium arsenide wafer. The photoresist is developed, and the unexposed portions are removed in a chemical process, leaving a pattern on the surface of the wafer. The wafer is then placed in a vacuum chamber, and exposed to the ion beam. The impact of the ions erodes the target, abrading away the areas not covered by the photoresist. This method is frequently enhanced by bleeding a reactive gas into the vacuum system, which is known as reactive ion etching.

Sputtering is also used in materials science to thin samples or specific regions of samples for transmission electron microscope analysis, or for extending surface analytical techniques such as secondary ion mass spectrometry or electron spectroscopy (XPS, AES) so that they can depth profile them.

Plasma physics | Semiconductor device fabrication | Thin film deposition