Photolithography essays

Photolithography essays The semiconductor industry is an industry working to make integrated circuit like processors chip for computers, simpler circuits for everyday appliances like T.V. and microwave oven, and even more complex circuits that control space shuttle and satellite. The heart of every one of these microprocessors is an integrated circuit chip. The very base of these circuit chips are made out of silicon wafer and combine with multiple times of Photolithography process to become the integrated circuit chips we use everyday. In this laboratory experiment, we are going to go through the process of photolithography with bare silicon wafer. Although the equipments in the laboratory were not operational, the instructor did give us a run down of the procedures of how to conduct this experiment. We first start with a bare clean silicon wafer, then we take this wafer to a machine called spinner to apply the photo resist. Put the wafer soak with photo resist into the furnace to soft bake in order for the photo resist to diffuse into the wafer. After about 30 minutes of baking, we take the wafer out and put the wafer on the Contact Aligner. Set the mask that you want to be printed on the wafer into the Contact Aligner and start to shine UV light onto the wafer through the mask. The UV light will only shine through the opening of the mask, damage the photo resist and leave a permanent print on the wafer. After the UV mask imprint, we take the wafer out and develop it in the Wet Bench. The photo resist acts as like a protector for the wafer, so the solution will etch away the part of the wafer that have been damage by the UV light. Nothing goes wrong with this experiment because we did not do this experiment due to mechanical failure. But if we are to left a wafer sitting in one of the rooms with white light for about an hour after it had been soft bake, then we may encounter problems with this experiment. Because wh ...