#please feel free to share more random engineering knowledge with me :3c or any knowledge whatsoever

[schakira]

Gray! How’s it going?! It’s been a while!

lol I saw your tags. I recently started a new job as a process engineer in a semi conductor wafer plant. I’m a lake new to the field so I’ll explain best I can 😅

Normally the method used to design the circuits on chips is to use something called photolithography. To do that you basically use this light sensitive paint and a custom designed mask to block part of it in the shape of the design. Then you can expose only the region you want.

What I am working on is a new method using a high powered electron beam and beam sensitive paint to directly draw the patterns on the chips! It’s called electron beam lithography instead. It takes a bit longer but then we don’t need to buy or make any more of the masks that they use for photo lithography. We are a small scale fabrication so buying a lot of masks is not ideal.

Drawing these small patterns requires really precise alignment of the beam so we can be sure to line up to the previous layers. There is a small + drawn into the stage where we place the wafer so we can use it to reference where we are pointing but I found out that others are using Penrose tilings to more accurately position themselves! It’s pretty cool but idk if I can convince my managers that we need to lol.

Anyway how are you??! What’s new? how are classes?

i love tjis so much i really love when people share their work/hobby/etc knowledge with me. i just really love learning new stuff it makes me feel whole.

when i was reading your explanation (obviously i am no professional in your field nor am i an engineer though i wish), i couldn't help but wonder if using a more energy-intensive method would be more cost-effective down the line.

but like it really sounds like buying the custom-made masks is just that much more expensive for small scale operations. kinda like offset printing, where we use printing plates for each CMYK colors. and we also use the + for positioning! but i guess i'll have to look into using penrose tilings for more accurate printing processes that actually seems promising!

what's new with me? eeeh a lot and not much at the same time to be honest. you know how switzerland is. slow