Export Tolerance for Very Small Features (nanometer)

[JuliaScivi]

Hello,

I am currently using inventor to design a piece fabricated by thin film technology (nanometer resolution). I have a structure which is 25nm thick (0.025 micron). Unfortunately, when I export it in STL format, the smallest tolerance is 0.1 micron. How can I change that? Is it possible to work with sub micro structures?

I need the correct dimensions, because I am doing a simulation in COMSOL using this design.

Thank you in advance for your help.

Best,

Julia

[swalton]

I've tried over the last few minutes to make a 25 nm cube with IV 2014 and I can't get IV to zoom in far enough to see any sketch geometry once I apply a 25nm dimension. 

What settings have you used to create these small features? 

I looked briefly in the IV help file to see if I could find a listing of the min/max feature size that Inventor supports, but I did not find anything.

I understand that STL files started out as a tool for 3d printing.  Wikipedia's article on 3d printing talks about printing resolutions on the order of 10-100 micrometers.  I don't think anyone spent any time making STL suitable for features 1000x smaller than the resolution of the typical output device. 

You might try stp or igus files. 

[mrattray]

@swalton There's a thread here somewhere where someone was drawing nanotubes in IV and ran into this same zoom problem. I think we found a fix using a registry hack, but I'm not sure now.
@JuliaScivi Can you use other formats per swalton's suggestion?

[JuliaScivi]

Hello,

Thank you for your answers!

So actually I made a mistake in my first post. I am exporting in STEP format (.stp). Truly sorry =/

Nevertheless, the minimum tolerance for .stp is still 0.1 micro (100 nm).

I tried to export in other file types, but none show what the minimum tolerance is. And when I try to import them back in COMSOL, I got errors, because of features which are too small. Any suggestions for the best export format?

Thank you again for your help and time.