Tagged metrology · show all articles
Deposition builds the layer. Etch cuts the pattern. Neither step tells you whether it worked. That's KLA's job — inspection and metrology, the unglamorous layer that decides what actually ships.
The 2019 redefinition replaced a cylinder in a vault with a fixed number. What that exchange actually bought, and what it did not, is a lesson in what a unit definition is for.
A chip is not carved, it is printed — the same four-step loop repeated across dozens of layers. Resolution stopped being the binding constraint some time ago; placement, variation and measurement took over.
Across the scientific revolution and after, the capacity to make an instrument repeatedly arrived first and forced explanation to catch up — a tendency, not a law, and one historians still argue about.