From beach sand to pure silicon
Designing the microscopic city
Printing with light in the cleanroom
Slicing, packaging, and testing the final chip
What company is the world's sole supplier of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines?
steve Print microscopic circuit layers to discover how a computer chip is actually made.
steve Photolithography uses ultraviolet light to transfer circuit patterns from photomasks onto light-sensitive chemicals.
What color of light is often used in cleanroom lithography areas to prevent accidental exposure?
steve Photolithography
We bounce the light off mirrors polished ultra-flat, To carve a billion pathways where the silicon's at.
steve Chemical acids or gases etch away the unprotected areas of the wafer, carving out the microscopic circuits.
Cleanroom standards: A single speck of household dust is like a giant boulder that can completely destroy a microchip circuit.
What is the process of injecting foreign atoms into silicon to alter its conductivity?
A process that uses light to transfer geometric patterns from a mask to a photosensitive substrate. Jay Lathrop patented the technique in 1957 while working on miniaturizing military transistor components.