It's really weird to me that this can be patented. Not that it's a bad patent, I just thought people had been doing nanometre scale photolithography with other metals for decades.
1)Demonstrably no novelty whatsoever. "My device does what they do just a bit smaller" isn't novelty unless the processes themselves are some kind of breakthrough which these clearly aren't.
2)Not being obvious is one of the conditions for a patent is the US[1]. It seems you could make a strong argument for this being obvious in the sense that
a)it is. "We have a thing that stores information by making it small. We want to store more information... I know let's make it smaller." is definitely an obvious chain of reasoning
b)to make it more obvious they even helped your argument by naming their thing after the one that's a bit bigger and just changed the name to the next engineering prefix down in scale.
3)Very clearly undermines their whole facade about doing something for the benefit of humanity.
IBM made a 3 atom wide transistor about 23 years ago, and just for fun constructed a model of the USS Enterprise from Star Trek (and no, i don't know which one, but i'd assume the one from TOS) out of atoms. Then they patented it and tucked it away in their vaults.
