I'm a software engineer for Leica Microsystems , an e-beam lithography company. My former
company, after 9 years of having a great tool and zero sales, finally went under for good.
Not that I'm bitter.
So. . . e-beam lithography.
The standard joke in the e-beam lithography business is, "don't you wish you could explain
what you do for a living at cocktail parties?" I'm gonna try. I have about three
explanations.
1. The one-sentence explanation: "We build machines that are used to make computer chips."
This is usually quite enough for most people, EE's and programmers aside.
2. The two-minute explanation: "Integrated circuits are made in a process a lot like making
a print from a photographic negative. Actually, it's like making about 30 prints on the same
piece of paper. You have something you want to print on - a piece of paper or a slice of
glass. You coat it with some chemicals I don't understand that react when light hits them.
You have a negative, which we call a mask. You shine bright light through the negative onto
the substrate, the thing you want to make the picture on. Then you do some more chemistry,
and you end up with the picture, or the circuit, on the substrate. Our machine draws the
negatives and we build them." Most people have had quite enough by now.
3. Some people actually want details. Here are some, in no particular order:
"E-beam. Electron Beam. What makes your TV work. If you take a TV and turn it on its
face, it's a lot like our machine. " The idea here is that if you don't know how a TV works,
you've changed the subject by now.
"Lithography. Etching. You know when you take a woodcut and make a print from it? Well,
carving the woodcut is lithography. What we do involves taking the e-beam and making a
pattern on a piece of coated transparent silicon, which is etched away with some nasty
chemicals. The result is a mask which is transparent where we write (or where we didn't,
depending on the coating) and the rest is covered with chrome."
"It's like a $7 million laser printer with 2.5 million dpi." The old machine was only
200,000 dpi, but it was really fast and had some very clever tricks.
"We have tolerances like 10 nanometers. Your hair grows 1 inch per month. That's 10
nanometers per second. "
Here's their webpage.
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