Opto-Line International, Inc.

Opto-Line International, Inc. is a customer oriented small business that strives to provide outstanding quality and service. From a small order of one part to high volume needs, Opto-Line treats every job as critical and dedicates its resources, knowledge and skills to delivering exceptional reticles, apertures and precision patterns. Photolithography, also termed optical lithography or UV lithography, is a process used in microfabrication to pattern parts of a thin film or the bulk of a substrate. It uses light to transfer a geometric pattern from a photomask to a light-sensitive chemical photoresist, or simply “resist,” on the substrate. A series of chemical treatments then either engraves the exposure pattern into, or enables deposition of a new material in the desired pattern upon, the material underneath the photo resist.

Photolithography shares some fundamental principles with photography in that the pattern in the etching resist is created by exposing it to light, either directly (without using a mask) or with a projected image using an optical mask. It is used because it can create extremely small patterns, it affords exact control over the shape and size of the objects it creates, and because it can create patterns over an entire surface cost-effectively.