What to do with an old lithography tool?

So you’ve got an old lithography tool hanging around. It doesn’t have the resolution (or any other spec) needed for production of pretty much anything that anyone wants to make. What can you do with it?

One option is to sell it to a Hollywood prop house. Apparently, that is what someone did with an old Cobilt mask aligner (at least, I think it is a Cobilt). It has probably shown up in several movies, but the one I saw it in was Silent Running, a good but not great sci-fi movie from 1972. Here are some shots from the movie.

Cobilt Aligner in Silent Running
Bruce Dern as Freeman Lowell limping past the mask aligner after murdering his crewmates.

Cobilt Aligner in Silent Running

Cobilt Aligner in Silent Running
Lowell using the mask aligner to reprogram the company droids to answer to him.

You can’t keep a good lithography tool down, not if you have a little imagination.

3 thoughts on “What to do with an old lithography tool?”

  1. Chris, I would not be a bit surprised if this contact aligner was the same one I saw on an old Star Trek episode. What was distinctive about this model was the rounded profile of the alignment microscope support. I worked with one back in 1986. I’m pretty sure it was one of our older Cobilt aligners

  2. If it was the movie in which Spock uses it to look at a blood sample, I believe it was also used in the sci-fi movie “Silent Running” to repair a computer chip. It was the contact aligner whose head lifts up and out of the way to put the mask and wafer in. I think those are Kasper aligners. There is a photo of it here: http://www.eltronresearch.com/facilities.html and that isn’t even used for lithography, near as I can tell.

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