Lithography

SCHOTT Advanced Optics supplies many different products used in industrial equipment

A small stepper, a giant leap

These steppers won’t help you exercise. But they’ll help you build the future. Chips. Microchips. Or rather: nano. Micro is totally yesterday. And smaller is where we’re going. Along with better, of course.

A stepper is as important for manufacturing chips (integrated electronic circuits) as potatoes are for the side dish of the same name. Select optical glass types, with features such as high UV permeability, are particularly suited for use in exposure systems and projector lenses in steppers. They work somewhat like a huge slide projector. But the structure of the “slides” is shrunk extremely and transferred onto silicon wafers coated with photoresist. This process of step-and-repeat continues until the complex structure of a circuit has been completed. Photolithographic structuring of photoresist layers is one of the key processes during the highly complex production of integrated circuits for semi-conductor technology. And the wafer’s done.