Both the general public and businesses worldwide have an insatiable appetite for faster, more complex and cheaper electronic equipment, such as computers, home entertainment systems, communication products etc. The integrated circuit (chip) is at the heart of all modern electronic equipment. In additon, many kinds of consumer and business equipment also incorporate nano-machine devices. The cost, performance and functionality of both of these types of devices are driven by the size of the individual component elements that comprise these devices, with smaller geometries resulting in increased performance and lower cost per function. Current circuits can have as many as a billion integrated transistors each with a minimum size smaller than 0.15 mm! A human hair is about 100 mm in diameter, meaning that over 50,000 transistors could be placed on the diameter of a single hair!

The tiny circuit elements (transistors) are produced on large wafers (8-12 inches in diameter) of ultra high purity silicon using a photographic-like technique known as photolithography or microlithography. This technique was "borrowed" from the printing industry where it is used to produce copper printing plates. The lithographic process involves transferring a circuit pattern into a polymer film that has been coated onto the semiconductor substrate. The polymer is known as a photoresist. There are two "tones" of resist viz. negative and positive. After exposure the resist is developed and the resulting three-dimensional image is used as an etch mask to transfer the pattern to an underlying thin film of a conductor, semiconductor or insulator using a chemical process known as plasma or reactive ion etching. These etching steps chemically remove the exposed thin films. These processing steps are repeated many times to "build" the three-dimensional circuit.

In a very similar fashion, the process is used to build devices into other types of materials, for example to make micro devices used for computer storage equipment or to make specialized sensing devices.

The photolithographic "stepper" (similar to a camera) is at the heart of this technology. Many of us at Ultratech have spent our entire careers designing, building and maintaining this complex equipment. There is simply no other opto-mechanical equipment in the world that is as complex, precise and reliable as these steppers, not to mention exciting. They must be able to print circuit elements smaller that 0.15 mm and place them with a precision of a few nanometers (1.0 mm = 1000 nm) while the substrate is moving at up to several meters per second! An entire 12-inch wafer is "printed" in less than 60 seconds and contain as many as a trillion individual elements. The smallest and most precise optical – mechanical equipment used in microsurgery and the most precise mechanical systems are not close to the precision achieved in photolithography equipment.