You’re in your mid-thirties. You have two children, a second-grader and a pre-schooler. You and your husband have a home in the town you both grew up in, you have a career teaching in an elementary school. Life is good.
For Tina Pugliese of Mechanicville, that good life scenario hit a massive speed bump on October 1, 2009 when she got the crushing news everyone dreads. She had cancer.
“I thought, oh my God, my kids are babies!” Tina said.
Article in the 09-03 issue.
So what is photolithography and how does it relate to microchips?
Also called UV lithography and optical lithography, this process describes how light is used to transfer patterned coatings from a ‘reticle’ to a light sensitive ‘photoresist’ on a substrate. Chemical treatment engraves this exposure pattern onto the substrate (the substrate is the silicon wafers we have been talking about, in this case), beneath the photoresist. This can be done multiple times; indeed, some microchips (integrated circuits, to the electronics world) have up to fifty layers on them. The process is not so different from regular photography, before the age of digital cameras, when a pattern was created in the presence of light, except that our resist (the layer used to transfer a pattern to a substrate) is not a picture but an exceedingly precise circuit pattern.
Read the entire article in the Sept. 4th issue of the Express.