Alec Broers, Baron Broers

In September 2008, Lord Broers took over from Sir David Cooksey as chairman of the board of directors at the Diamond Light Source, the United Kingdom's largest new scientific facility for 45 years.

In 1994 Broers was elected an international member of the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to electronic beam lithography and microscopy and for leadership in microfabrication.

Broers subsequently became Master of Churchill College, Cambridge (1990–96) and Head of the Cambridge University Engineering Department (1993–96). He was Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, 1996–2003. In 1997 he was invited to deliver the MacMillan Memorial Lecture to the Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland. He chose the subject "The Role and Education of the Creative Engineer". He was knighted in 1998 and created a crossbench life peer in 2004, as Baron Broers, of Cambridge in the County of Cambridgeshire. Lord Broers was Chairman of the Science and Technology Committee of the House of Lords from 2004 to 2007 and was President of the Royal Academy of Engineering from 2001 to 2006.

Lord Broers has received more than twenty honorary degrees and fellowships from universities, colleges, and academic and professional institutions. He is a Foreign Member of the US National Academy of Engineering, the Chinese Academy of Engineering, the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, and the American Philosophical Society. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 1985. He is an Honorary Fellow of St Edmund's College, Cambridge.

Broers then worked in the research and development laboratories of IBM in the United States for 19 years before returning to Cambridge in 1984 to become Professor of Electrical Engineering (1984–96) and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge (1985–90). He is a pioneer of nanotechnology.

"I had a marvellous time doing research in the IBM research laboratory" he recalls "I had essentially turned my hobby into my career." He remembers having a roomful of electronics and was overjoyed to spend his time building new things and testing them. There he spent around 16 years in research in one of the best 'playhouses for electronics' 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.

Alec Broers began his research career in the Engineering Department of the University of Cambridge in 1961 working with Professor Oatley, and later with Dr William C Nixon, on the in situ study of surfaces undergoing ion etching in the scanning electron microscope (SEM). The microscope he used had originally been built by Oatley and had then been modified Garry Stewart who had also added an ion source that focussed ions onto the sample surface. Garry Stewart, who was another of Professor Oatley's students, then moved to the Cambridge Instrument Company where he oversaw the design and building of the world's first commercial SEM, the Stereoscan. During his PhD Alec rebuilt the SEM fitting a magnetic final lens in place of the original electrostatic lens thereby improving the microscope's resolution to about 10 nm, and after examining ion etched surfaces, used the microscope's electron beam for the first time to write patterns, subsequently using ion etching to transfer these patterns into gold, tungsten and silicon structures as small as 40 nm. These were the first man-made nanostructures in materials suitable for microelectronic circuits opening up the possibility for the extreme miniaturization of electronic circuits that was to occur in the decades to come.

After graduating from Cambridge, Lord Broers spent nearly 20 years in research and development with IBM in the United States. He worked for sixteen years at the Thomas J Watson Research Centre in New York, then for 3 years at the East Fishkill Development Laboratory, and finally at Corporate Headquarters. His first assignment at the T J Watson Research laboratory was to find a long life electron emitter to replace the tungsten wire filaments used in electron microscopes at the time. IBM had built the first billion bit computer store using an electron beam to write on photographic film and the relatively short lifetime of the tungsten filament sources was not acceptable. To solve this problem he developed the first practical electron guns that used LaB6 emitters. These emitters not only solved the lifetime problem, but also provided higher electron brightness than tungsten filaments, and in the late 1960s and early 1970s he built two new SEMs for examining surfaces that took advantage of this and produced higher resolution than previous SEMs (3 nm in the secondary electron surface mode) and then a short focal length instrument with 0.5 nm beam size. He used the second SEM to examine thin samples in the transmission mode and to examine solid samples using the high energy electron scattered from the surface of the sample, the electrons that had been called 'low-loss electrons by Oliver C Wells who had proposed their use in the SEM. Initially this high resolution low-loss mode was used to examine bacteriophage and blood cells in collaboration with researchers at NYU, and at the Veteran's Administration Hospital in New Jersey however, the bulk of his work was devoted to using the microscopes as tools to scribe things using the lithography techniques that were becoming familiar for making silicon chips. He and his colleague Michael Hatzakis used these new electron beam lithography to make the first silicon transistors with micron dimensions. and sub-micron dimensions showing that it would be possible to scale down the dimensions of electron devices well below the dimensions that were being used at the time.

Alec Nigel Broers, Baron Broers, FRS, FMedSci, FREng (born 17 September 1938) is a British electrical engineer.