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An i-line stepper at Cornell NanoScale Science and Technology Facility. (Photo taken under inactinic light.)
A stepper or wafer stepper is a device used in the manufacture of integrated circuits (ICs). It is an essential part of the process of photolithography, which creates millions of microscopic circuit elements on the surface of silicon wafers out of which chips are made. It is similar in operation to a slide projector or a photographic enlarger. The ICs that are made form the heart of computer processors, memory chips, and many other electronic devices.
Stepper is short for step-and-repeat camera.
The stepper emerged in the late 1970s but did not become widespread until the 1980s. This was because it was replacing an earlier technology, the mask aligner. Aligners imaged the entire surface of a wafer at the same time, producing many chips in a single operation. In contrast, the stepper imaged only one chip at a time, and was thus much slower to operate. The stepper eventually displaced the aligner when the relentless forces of Moore's Law demanded that smaller feature sizes be used. Because the stepper imaged only one chip at a time it offered higher resolution and was the first technology to exceed the 1 micron limit. The addition of auto-alignment systems reduced the setup time needed to image multiple ICs, and by the late 1980s, the stepper had almost entirely replaced the aligner in the high-end market.
The stepper was itself replaced by the step-and-scan systems (scanners) which offered an additional order of magnitude resolution advance. Step-and-scan systems work by scanning only a small portion of the mask for an individual IC, and thus require much longer operation times than the original steppers. Step-and-scan systems became widespread during the 1990s and essentially universal by the 2000s. Today, step-and-scan systems are so widespread that they are often simply referred to as steppers. An example of a step-and-scan system is the PAS 5500 from ASML.
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