A stepper is a device used in the manufacture of integrated circuits (ICs) that is similar in operation to a slide projector or a photographic enlarger. Stepper is short for step-and-repeat camera. Steppers are an essential part of the complex process, called photolithography, which creates millions of microscopic circuit elements on the surface of silicon wafers out of which chips are made. These chips form the heart of ICs such as computer processors, memory chips, and many other devices.
The stepper emerged in the late 1970s but did not become widespread until the 1980s. This was because it was replacing an earlier technology, the mask aligner. Aligners imaged the entire surface of a wafer at the same time, producing many chips in a single operation. In contrast, the stepper imaged only one chip at a time, and was thus much slower to operate. The stepper eventually displaced the aligner when the relentless forces of Moore's Law demanded that smaller feature sizes be used. Because the stepper imaged only one chip at a time it offered higher resolution and was the first technology to exceed the 1 micron limit. The addition of auto-alignment systems reduced the setup time needed to image multiple ICs, and by the late 1980s, the stepper had almost entirely replaced the aligner in the high-end market.
The stepper was itself replaced by the step-and-scan systems (scanners) which offered an additional order of magnitude resolution advance, and work by scanning only a small portion of the mask for an individual IC, and thus require much longer operation times than the original steppers. These became widespread during the 1990s and essentially universal by the 2000s. Today, step-and-scan systems are so widespread that they are often simply referred to as steppers.
1957: Attempts to miniaturize electronic circuits started back in 1957 when Jay Lathrop and James Nall of the U.S. Army's Diamond Ordnance Fuse Laboratories were granted a US2890395A patent for a photolithographic technique that could be used to deposit thin-film metal strips that in turn used to connect discrete transistors on a ceramic plate.
Cette page est générée automatiquement et peut contenir des informations qui ne sont pas correctes, complètes, à jour ou pertinentes par rapport à votre recherche. Il en va de même pour toutes les autres pages de ce site. Veillez à vérifier les informations auprès des sources officielles de l'EPFL.
Micro- and nanofabrication can be taught to students and professionals by textbooks and ex-cathedra lectures, but the real learning comes from seeing the manufacturing steps as they happen. This MOOC
Digital IC Design presents the fundamentals of digital integrated circuit design. The methods and techniques aiming at the fabrication and development of digital integrated circuits are reviewed, the
vignette|La technologie EUV. vignette|Outil de lithographie EUV. La lithographie extrême ultraviolet ou lithographie EUV est un procédé de photolithographie assez semblable aux procédés de lithographie classiques actuels. Il utilise un rayonnement ultraviolet (UV) d'une longueur d'onde de l'ordre de dix à quinze nanomètres (le rayonnement EUV avoisine donc la gamme des rayons X-mous), en remplaçant les objectifs (ou masques dits « en transmission ») par une série de miroirs de précision (exemple des masques dits « en réflexion »).
Couvre les techniques d'exploitation avancées pour un Microscope Electronique de Transmission (TEM), y compris la mise en place de l'ensemble de travail et le réglage fin de l'image.
Explore les systèmes de projection de masques, le micro-traitement laser, les structures submicroniques, les faisceaux gaussiens, les principes de guidage d'onde et l'interaction entre la lumière et les matériaux.
Couvre l'intégration de processus dans la fabrication de semi-conducteurs, y compris le processus à double puits, les méthodes d'isolation, l'ajustement de la tension de seuil et la formation de siliciure.
PET reconstruction algorithms have long relied on sinogram rebinning. However, as detectors grow smaller in a recent wave of cutting-edge scanners, individual sensors no longer accrue hundreds of photons. Instead, most detect a single photon or none at all ...
During this project, the microfabrication of Hafnium Carbide (HfC) was investigated. Multiple tools were considered and tested for their compatibility and effectiveness when working with HfC. The main method of choice for the machining of HfC thin films wa ...
This semester project aimed at simulating two approaches for low temperature dependence of resonance frequency of resonators. The first one consists in using AT-cut quartz as the resonator’s material. The AT-cut quartz wafers are made using a 35° angle wit ...