Reference Module in Materials Science and Materials Engineering || Optical Lithography

摘要： Optical lithography is a photon-based technique comprised of projecting, or shadow casting, an image into a photosensitive emulsion (photoresist) coated onto the substrate of choice. Today it is the most widely used lithography process in the manufacturing of nano-electronics by the semiconductor industry, a $400 Billion industry worldwide. Optical lithography’s ubiquitous use is a direct result of its highly parallel nature allowing vast amounts of information (i.e., patterns) to be transferred in a very short time. For example, considering the specification of a modern leading edge scanner (150–300-mm wafers per hour and 40-nm two-dimensional pattern resolution), the pixel throughput can be found to be approximately 1.8T pixels per second. Continual advances in optical lithography capabilities have enabled the computing revolution we have undergone over the past 50 years.