Hello everyone, i am Noah, M.Sc. in EE / Nanoelectronics from RWTH Aachen University. would be very interested participating in building a stepper scanner. What is your idea for tackling the problem? It would be helpful to understand what kind of expertise is needed in the team (as I do not know the current members of this group and couldnt join the mumble chat yesterday) to see if i could be of much help. Small disclaimer, I would be able to participate come the second week of February. Right now my schedule is way too packed already.
Best, Noah
________________________________ Von: Libresilicon-developers libresilicon-developers-bounces@list.libresilicon.com im Auftrag von David Lanzendörfer david.lanzendoerfer@lanceville.cn Gesendet: Sonntag, 12. Januar 2020 18:32:45 An: libresilicon-developers@list.libresilicon.com Betreff: Re: [Libre-silicon-devel] Reminder - Next Mumble session on Sunday, 12/01/2020, 21.00 HKT
Hi I've now sent an email to a mass-tape-out capable factory in Portugal, and asked whether they'd be interested into participating into LibreSilicon. I'm now waiting for an answer.
About the stepper aligner with mask less lithography feature: You don't need a clean room for refurbishing an old stepper aligner and replacing the mask exposure part with a projector.
I'm right now in Hong Kong and will most likely move over to Portugal, as soon as I finally get a feedback from the European Union on the status of my offer to continue our research there.
I don't have the time to work full time on reverse engineering a stepper aligner besides developing a manufacturing process, but I can certainly give any volunteer for this task a helping hand with my long years of experience in doing so.
Cheers -lev
On Monday, 13 January 2020 12:44:27 AM HKT Hagen SANKOWSKI wrote:
Hello List.
Today, while talking about different possibilities to get back into a clean room and to continue with our work there, we had once again an other technical topic in our weekly Mumble session regarding the feature size on the steppers [0],[1].
All other machines are quite feasible in every clean room, but the resolution of the stepper determinate the size feature size of our technology node. Or, with smaller stepper resolutions we can manufacture smaller structures with Photolithography [2],[3] on silicon. Short, this machines limiting our possibilities, and, of course, they need masks [4] which are quite expensive.
Already a couple of weeks ago came up the idea of using quite common display techniques instead of classical masks, which would allow to manufacture / photolithography mask-less but faster than usual Laser plotters are. Today Ference proposed to use the also quite common DPL technique [6],[7] which is used in Off-the-Shelf Projectors.
So we are now thinking about designing / building a Stepper from scratch, or to replace the mask-holding parts / optics by something like Laser + Diffusor + DLP.
Of course, this machine building stuff should be also open source, public and community-driven as well as our LibreSilicon process. In the beginning there is no need for keeping this machine in a clean room under controlled conditions. Just later, when it comes to production a machines has to get clean.
So are there physicist out there which like to deal with this topic of constructing / hacking hacking such equipment?
Please, if somebody of you on the list, or someone in your social surroundings, is interesting in this topic, let us know it. We are happy to seeing this kind of hacktivism also rising :-)
Best Regards, Hagen.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepper [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepper_(Halbleitertechnik) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photolithography [3] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fotolithografie_(Halbleitertechnik) [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photomask [5] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fotomaske [6[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Light_Processing [7] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Light_Processing