How light helps make a microchip

A microchip is built in layers on a wafer, a thin slice of silicon. During lithography, a light-sensitive coating on the wafer's surface helps record the pattern for a layer.

Lithography uses light to place that pattern. ASML describes a process in which light carries a pattern from a mask onto the coated wafer, and optics shrink and focus it.

ASML also describes moving the wafer and repeating the exposure. Later steps turn those patterns into the structures that make a chip work.

ASML, which makes lithography systems, lists a Hutto office. This note describes the technology in general, not the work at that address.