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