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Byline: Christina Wise
Investor's Business Daily
If you're DuPont Photomasks Inc., making money means making machines capable ofblazing a line just 0.18 microns wide - about 1/400th the width of a human hair.
And you have to bend light to do it.
It's called subwavelength technology. And it's become more crucial as chips areused to power everything from cell phones to PlayStations to Palm Pilots.
Made of high-purity quartz or glass, the photomasks serve as a kind
of stencil for semiconductors. When chips are made, light is sent through a lens, which is covered by a mask, onto a silicon wafer. This etches the mask design on the wafer, which is coated with a light-sensitive material.