Drs. David Ruzic and Jason Peck from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed a new plasma etching process assisted by a polarized pulsed laser. This technology addresses the need of damageless, anisotropic etching for features of 100 nm or less. It is the only known process to etch 3D structures in integrated circuits which lie along one direction, and not etch those that are perpendicular. It will enable making integrated circuits with smaller feature sizes.