Researchers at MIT have developed a novel photolithography technique that could significantly improve the fabrication of thin mirrors and silicon wafers.
The new approach to reshaping thin plate materials enables precise and complex shapes typically used for high-level, complex systems, like deformable mirrors or wafer-flattening processes during semiconductor manufacturing. By printing stress patterns lithographically to deform optical or semiconductor surfaces, the researchers believe future production will be more precise, scalable, and cheap.
The research is published in the April 20 issue of Optica.