Month: June 2018

[From the last episode: Photolithography allows us to be selective about where we add material and where we remove it.] Before we dive into how sensors and actuators are made, here’s an important question: Sensors aren’t new, so why all the hullabaloo now? Old and Bulky Don’t Cut It OK, […]

[From the last episode: we looked at different ways of removing material from a wafer.] So far we’ve seen that we can add materials to a wafer and we can remove them. But, if those are our only tools, then it’s not particularly useful, since we’re covering a whole wafer […]

[From the last episode: There are many kinds of materials that you might want to add to a wafer, and there are many different ways of doing that.] Last time, we looked at adding materials to a wafer, and we used the generic meaning of deposition to cover all the […]

[From the last episode: Building chips starts with a silicon wafer. From there you add and remove material with the assistance of photolithography.] This week’s piece is about what we called deposition in last week’s edition. “Deposition” actually means something more specific when processing silicon wafers, so, for the moment, […]