Small but powerful

The new chip-scale devices at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder are as small as a grain of rice and almost as accurate as physics will allow.    

Sure, NIST has always had cool toys. In fact, the NIST-F1 Cesium Fountain Atomic Clock keeps the official time and frequency standard for the United States. But the chip-scale devices team in NIST’s Atomic Devices and Instrumentation Group aims to take the devices created at the laboratory and miniaturize them for use in a wider range of applications.

“NIST has a lot of great programs whose mission is to produce those…