Building a $2,000,000 machine in 2 months

Why bother with the rotation stage? Good question! It was for multi-layer alignments. I.e. pattern first layer wherever on the substrate, and then align all subsequent layers to registration marks on the first layer. In theory this could all be done in software (rotate the image digitally) but it introduces a lot of complexity to the software. I thought mechanical solution would be easier. But my design (direct drive to a stepper motor) was a flawed idea and in retrospect there are much better ways to do it.

What a time to be alive where one dude can recreate things that took a dozen of brilliant minds years and millions of dollars.

Greeting's from Intel's sub-nm research team! It's super incredible to see hobbyists getting to the point of making real semiconductors in the home shops. I did my PhD on reducing resistance in chip-to-chip bonds, so if you ever get to that point where you want to make a really tiny sandwich, definitely get in touch down here!

"Screws take up physical space" is such a funny cad-to-IRL problem. I made a similar mistake with a lego robot arm I was designing in cad, and everything was very meticulously physically simulated to ensure all joints, cables, etc were perfectly fine. And then I tried to build it and realized a few of my critical fastening pins along the arm's base were unable to be inserted because they would have to simply cease to exist and then magically re-manifest inside the already-assembled part, whoops.

You should have a chat with Cylo's Garage, he works on high precision mechanical systems down to the nm level.

7:13 Neat! Haven't seen anyone shout out Huygens Optics channel before. I love it

"I'm not an electrical engineer" - the guy who titled his video 'speedrunning 30yrs of semiconductor history'

It's truly stupendous of Zaber to have donated such a critical part.

Have you considered using a blu-ray pickup for both the UV laser and optics systems, and as a stage? A standard pickup has a nanometer accurate voice coil holding a lens, and a UV laser, as well as a photodiode, through you probably don't need that. I know there's been a paper on using them as a micro 3d resin printer. The idea is you use two pickups facing each other at right angles, since they only move in one horizontal axis as well as vertically, so you attach the sample to one pickup and use the other to scan the laser over the sample. I've used them to make a laser scanning microscope with extremely high magnification (diffraction-limited), so the potential is there. You can even use the photodiode to measure the distance to the sample with nanometer accuracy, which should help keep things in focus. The real limiting factor is that the pickup's coils, while extremely accurate, can't hold much weight. That means if you use one to hold the sample, you'd be limited to a couple grams max. Fun fact: you can even use those same pickups to make an atomic force microscope

Fun fact about standing waves in photolithography, they are worse the more narrow your source wavelength filters are. Standing waves are worse for laser and led sources vs hg lamps. Source: I make antireflective coatings for litho for a living.

Enjoying this greatly. I chuckled at the comment about professional use of 80/20. You might be surprised to learn how much 80/20 or Rexroth is used in production multimillion dollar tools by a variety of tool vendors...

41:00 Killing the LED is due to too high drive current. Look at the schematic and try to lower it or use different diodes that can handle it.

It just hit me that a DMD chip is basically a really, really small flip dot display. In a way

The things you cut from this are my favorite parts - the really nerdy stuff. I care a lot less about watching the assembly of the frame, than I do about the design of the frame for instance. I enjoyed this video, but I'm really looking forwards to the next, regardless of the effort that goes into it.

So I work as an engineer developing lithography machines and it is funny to me how I have very little knowledge of the process as a whole, while noticing a lot of small things that would never fly at work. It is great to see someone build a working machine in an hour instead of focusing on a small gear in a very large machine for a year at a time.

Putting a stepper motor on such a precise x-y stage kills all the precision to begin with

i just realised something, in aerospace theres Aerobraking, and the cursed euphemism Lithobraking, which just means crashing into the ground, but if you use the terms the same way, Lithography literally means "Rock Writing" we write patterns into rocks to make them think... literal runic carvings, we are magical rune carvers

Hey! Optical scientist here! I design and build these kind of setups for living (used to be custom microscope systems, but now space instruments). So fun to see what you can achieve with DIY stuff! Youre doing an excellent job!! For me building and aligning is always the best part of a project. I think you can ease your alignment process a lot by using good alignment tools and mounts with the appropiate degree of freedom control. For instance, putting the objective on a z-translation cage mount would massively improve the alignment control. For the alignment tools I would suggest cheap ones screw on alignment targets and frosted glass disks. You can also make these yourself! When I design and build systems I spend most of my time thinking how I will align it. Where is fine adjustment needed? What can be mechanically toleranced? Thinking ahead of all these things saves you massives amounts of time. I know for sure your next optical system will be even better! Keep it up😊

I‘m not even halfway through the video and I’m already impressed

This is possibly my favorite channel. You have the perfect personality for doing all the things you do and talking about them, no idea how you are able to stay so optimistic and calm when I know how darn frustrating and tedious many of the issues that can and do come up are. This particular video came out at a really great time for me as I'm about to be working on literally the exact same thing (something I've been working towards for years but finally now have the time)