Lithography Glossary

Written by Chris Mack
Brought to you by the creators of PROLITH

Vapor Prime
A chemical treatment of a wafer to remove water from its surface in preparation for coating with resist in which the wafer is exposed to the vapor of an adhesion promotor.

Example: The most effective method of applying adhesion promoter is the vapor prime method.

Vector Scan
A type of direct write lithography where an exposing beam is not raster scanned but rather is moved directly to the area to be exposed before the beam is turned on and scanned over the exposure area.

Example: For some mask patterns, vector scan exposure tools can show much greater throughput than traditional raster scan tools.

Vector Wave Theory
A complete and accurate treatment of imaging, based on Maxwell's equations, that accounts for the vector nature of light. In imaging applications, vector theory will interfere two beams based on the degree of overlap of their electric fields.

Example: As numerical apertures increase above 0.7, vector wave theory becomes a requirement for accurately predicting lithographic imaging phenomena.

VLSI
Very Large Scale Integration, an integrated circuit made of tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of transistors.

Example: The importance of lithography became obvious as the industry moved to VLSI circuits.