International cooperation to develop low cost equipment devoted to microelectronics laboratory education

The pedagogical approach for engineers in EIE must include a part of practice that highlights and fixes the concepts in the mind of the future engineers. In the field of microelectronics, education in technology contributes to improve the quality and efficiency of the formation, but unfortunately, the cost of equipment in classical plants is extremely high; it is more and more difficult for an academic institution to buy and maintain fabrication equipment including cleanroom and associated process step machines. However, one can develop simplified process at low cost by relaxing the drastic rules of integrated microelectronics. This paper presents the approach to develop an alignment and exposure machine for processing small substrates, which was set up thanks to an international cooperation between two French microelectronics centres and a Brazilian laboratory. A prototype is now available and the first experiments have revealed some possibility of improvements that are now on progress. Dissemination in academic and research laboratories may be considered.