in the world, building microscopes and equipment for the fabrication of miniature components. In 1977 he was given the enviable position of being an IBM fellow, an honour accorded to, at that time, only around 40 out of IBM's 40,000 engineers and scientists. This gave him the freedom to follow whatever road of enquiry he wished and he continued his work pushing the limits of what was called at the time microfabrication. Over the next ten years he conducted a series of careful experiments measuring the ultimate resolution of electron beam lithography and then used the highest resolution methods to fabricate electronic devices. One of the deleterious effects that limited resolution was the fogging effect of the electrons backscattered from the bulk of the sample. To avoid this Broers and Sedgwick invented a thin membrane substrate using technologies used to make inkjet printer heads. The membrane was thin enough effectively to eliminate the backscattered electrons. These membrane substrates allowed the first metal structures with dimensions below 10 nm to be fabricated and tested. Because these dimensions were now measured in single nanometers he and his coworkers decided to call these nanostructures and the techniques used to make them nanofabrication rather than use the prefix micro that had been common parlance until then. These membrane samples also found application many years later in MEMs (Micro-Electro-Mechanical) devices, and also as 'cantilevers' in biomedical applications. Early experiments with X-ray lithography also used similar membranes. When he arrived back in Cambridge, Lord Broers set up a nanofabrication laboratory to extend the technology of miniaturisation to the atomic scale by developing some of the novel fabrication methods that he had discovered at IBM. He modified a 400 kV transmission electron microscope (JEOL 4000EX) so that it operated in a scanning mode and produced a minimum beam size of about 0.3 nm. He used this system working in collaboration with researchers at the IMEC microelectronics research laboratory in Leuven, Belgium, to build some of the smallest and fastest field effect transistors that had ever been built. References External sources The Reith lectures, 2005 were given by Lord Broers Interview with Lord Broers, Ingenia Magazine, March 2005 Profile of Lord Broers Lord Broers on the triumph of technology, March 2005 Living people 1938 births People educated at Geelong Grammar School University of Melbourne alumni Alumni of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge Fellows of the Institution of Mechanical