As consumers come to expect that everything from cell phones to stuffed animals will pack significant computing power, manufacturers are under pressure to churn out ever faster and cheaper microchips. But making computer chips using photolithography-the standard manufacturing technique-is wildly expensive. A significant part of that cost is the stencil-like "masks" that filter the light beam used to pattern millions of transistors onto a chip. Indeed, making a single silicon chip can require as many as 30 masks costing more than a million dollars-and as the transistors on a chip continue to shrink, the cost of the masks only grows.

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