Annals of Business Administrative Science
Online ISSN : 1347-4456
Print ISSN : 1347-4464
ISSN-L : 1347-4456
Rayleigh Criterion
The Paradigm of Photolithography Equipment
Nobuo TAKAHASHIHiroki KIKUCHI
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JOURNAL OPEN ACCESS

2017 Volume 16 Issue 5 Pages 203-213

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Abstract

Photolithography equipment used in the manufacture of semiconductors has been predicted to hit a technological limit based on the Rayleigh criterion in terms of resolution. In actuality, however, the predicted limits of resolution are exceeded and increased microfabrication of photolithography equipment is achieved because of a change in the architecture from {mirror system, equal magnification, batch exposure} to {lens system, reduction, divided exposure}. Instead of using the Rayleigh criterion to make such predictions, experts use it to repeatedly generate “a set of recurrent and quasi-standard illustrations” as methods to improve resolution. The Rayleigh criterion itself is a typical example of what Kuhn (1962) termed a “community paradigm,” by which improvements to resolution were achieved by (a) increasing numerical aperture, (b) shortening wavelength, and (c) reducing the k1 factor.

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© 2017 Nobuo Takahashi and Hiroki Kikuchi. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons [Attribution 4.0 International] license.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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