Initially predicting to sell perhaps 50 units, Perkin-Elmer eventually sold about 2,000,[a] making them the by far largest vendor in the semiconductor fabrication equipment space through the second half of the 1970s and early 1980s.
The company was slow to respond to the challenge of the stepper, which replaced the projection aligners in most roles starting in the mid-1980s.
In 1990, Perkin-Elmer sold the division to Silicon Valley Group, which is today part of ASML Holding.
The process begins with thin disks of highly pure silicon being sawn from a crystalline cylinder known as a boule.
However, larger wafers give rise to significant optical issues; focussing the light over the area while maintaining very high uniformity was a major challenge.
One of the most annoying was that any dust that reached the aligner's interior might stick to the mask and would be imaged on subsequent wafers as if it were part of the pattern.
The thermal stability of these masks during exposure to bright light caused distortions, which were not a concern in the early days but became an issue as feature sizes continued to shrink.
Microprocessors, in particular, were complex multi-layer designs that had extremely low yield, with perhaps 1 in 10 of the patterns on a wafer delivering a working chip.
This improved the life of the mask and allowed a more complex design, but had the downside that diffraction effects limited its use to relatively large features compared to the contact aligners.
The resulting system could produce 2.5 μm features, 100 millionths of an inch, equal to the best contact aligners.
[11] With a large number of lenses, dispersion was a significant problem, which they addressed by filtering out everything but a single band of UV only 200-angstrom wide (the G-line), throwing away the majority of the light coming from the 1,000 W lamp.
[9] Another significant problem was that the filters removed the visible light as well as UV, which made it impossible for the operators to view the chips during the alignment process.
Offner decided to explore systems that would focus the light using mirrors instead of lenses, thus avoiding the problem of dispersion.
[9] Offner's solution was to use only a small portion of the mirror system to image the mask, a section where the focus was guaranteed to be correct.
[14] When the board of directors asked about the potential market, he suggested that the company might sell 50 of the systems, which was laughed at as no one could imagine a requirement for 50 such machines.
[16] In May 1971 a production team was formed, led by Jere Buckley, a mechanical designer, and Dave Markle, an optical engineer.
[13] They developed a new layout where both the mask and wafer were held on opposite ends of a C-shaped holder, at right angles to the main mirror.
By making the C-shaped holder large enough, rotating the assembly produced a facsimile of horizontal scanning that was more than accurate enough for the desired resolution.
They called Ray Paquette at Advanced Radiation Corporation, and after working on it for about two hours he had produced a sample of a curved lamp.
They sent one of their experienced operators to Perkin-Elmer and began sorting out the practical problems of fabrication that the company had not had to deal with previously.
[6] The first sale of what was now known as the Micralign 100 was in 1974 to Texas Instruments, which paid $98,000 for the machine, equivalent to $624,833 in 2024, about three times that of existing high-end contact aligners.
A 1975 report by a 3rd party research firm outlined the impressive advantages; because the contact problems with dirt and sticking emulsion were eliminated, yields had improved dramatically.
They introduced the 6502 only a year after the 6800, selling it for $25 in singles, and sold the subsequent 6507 with their RIOT support IC to Atari for a total of $12 per pair.
This higher price was offset by its ability to print more chips per wafer, due to the smaller feature sizes.
[28] By the early 1980s, Perkin-Elmer was firmly in control of the majority of the aligner market, in spite of concerted efforts on the parts of many companies to enter the space.
[28] While Perkin-Elmer was introducing the Micralign, several other companies were working on different solutions to the same basic problem of focussing a light across the ever-growing wafers.
The Micralign was running out of resolution, while the additional magnification in the GCA system allowed it to operate at finer feature sizes.
Perkin-Elmer had simply not listened to its customers who were clamoring for higher resolution, and ignored the research and development of newer systems.
[30] Instead of steppers, the Model 600 bet on Deep UV (note: correcting interview "EUV" blooper) (DUV) as a solution to the resolution problem.
IBM used these to run a memory chip series, but no one else had an effective photoresist that worked in DUV, and few other customers purchased the system.