In the last decade a plethora of nanotechnology-based products increasingly pervaded the commercial marketplace. In this view the concomitant development of reliable characterization techniques and suitable standards is needed to control of the manufacturing processes, particularly where product characteristics are shrunk to the nanometric level. The need for a new dimensional nanometrology is evident in fields such as the microelectronics, in which the critical dimensions of the devices are scaled down to less than 10 nm and geometrical complexity of objects is increased. Consequently, major research and development efforts have to be undertaken in order to answer this challenge. To meet such need the European Association of National Metrology Institutes (EURAMET) is currently financing several projects devoted to provide to the European industry and manufacturing new trusted measurements, instrumentation, tolerance rules and procedures as well as traceability and calibration methods. These projects cover a large area of topics such as the dimensional metrology, the 3D-resolved chemical composition analysis, the electrical and environmental metrology.

The ultimate goal of the group is the realization of 3D model systems and 3D nano-structured reference materials useful to transfer traceability to analytical instrumentation (e.g. lateral length standards at the nanoscale, 3D chemical composition, mass quantification and AFM nanotips).