UVa MRSEC researcher Jack Hudson has been working with Rolf Schuster and colleagues at the Fritz-Haber Institute in Berlin , Germany to develop new electrochemical machining (ECM) methods that use ultra-short charging pulses to define nanoscale topographic features into which material can be subsequently deposited. Having demonstrated ECM of metal surfaces with resolution c. 100 nm, initial results on p-doped Si(100) show, consistent with existing literature, three types of features: electro-polished regions, porous silicon, and roughened regions, as functions of the anodic potential. Fabrication of laterally confined electropolished or roughened features allows for selective, self-directed DC electrochemical deposition of Cu. This presumably occurs because these surface regions provide higher localized defect electronic states, which facilitate metal reduction. These techniques appear to hold the prospect of enabling metal contact line self-alignment to ECM topographically templated nucleation sites.