Technology suitable for small quantity production Ultraviolet lithography is a technology which involves surface cleaning, photoresist coating by spin-coating, spraying or dip-coating, exposing to UV radiation, developing and isotropic or anisotropic wet-etching of metals and semiconductors or dry-etching (anisotropic etching with verticallity of 89º, maximum aspect ratio in the order of 15) for pattern transfer. Typical pattern resolution is 1 micron, although resolutions up to 0.5 microns are often obtained in some ultra precision processes. Silicon or Pyrex wafers are the usual materials etched but experience also exists on how to work successfully with reel-to-reel processing in a wide variety of metals, alloys and polymers.

Most processes developed in microtechnology use ultraviolet lithography as a first process step. The applications are focused on generating micropatterns which allow the photoresist (positive or negative) to be used as a mask for etching processes, making pattern transfer by lift-off technology, or even generating the master for electroplating in UV-LIGA technology.

This technology is broadly used for microproduction. Among the different applications are mechanical sensors, optical sensors, electrochemical sensors, microstamps and all kinds of MEMS.