Pope Benedict XVI will receive a unique gift from President Shimon Peres upon his visit to the Holy Land this week: a bible engraved on a chip far smaller than the head of a pin.

The nano-bible, consisting of the five Books of Moses, was created at the Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute at Technion - The Israel Institute of Technology - using a focused ion beam (FIB) on a 0.5 sq mm gold-plated silicon chip 20 nano-meters thick, and is part of a miniaturization project intended to answer the question: "How small can the bible be?".

The bible contains 10 million bits of data. The FIB sends focused beams of tiny particles (gallium ions) towards a specific object. When the particles hit the object, they cause the atoms of that object to bounce off of it, thus etching it. The structure of the nano-Bible was built using special software developed in the project's framework, which enables etching text on the surface layer

Source: israel21c /...