Virtual Booth

Photolithography is one of the most critical back-end processes in integrated circuit (IC) fabrication, yet undergraduate students in electrical engineering rarely gain hands-on exposure to it because industrial ultraviolet (UV) lithography equipment is expensive, hazardous, and confined to cleanroom facilities. This gap leaves students with a strong theoretical grasp of MOSFET fabrication and interconnect layers, but with little intuitive feel for the exposure step that defines every mask level. To bridge this gap, SLIDeX (Smart Lithography Integrated Design Ecosystem) was developed as a bench-top miniature photolithography teaching aid targeted at semiconductor students. The system was designed as an automated PCB exposure platform, developed with a real prototype PCB, an ESP32 microcontroller with a full sensor telemetry stack, and a live web dashboard, and further implemented on a Raspberry Pi 3B+ for edge inferencing of an AI-driven self-reset capability that autonomously swaps in a replacement UV torch within four seconds whenever the primary torch degrades. The novelty of SLIDeX lies in combining live photolithography demonstration with an on-device machine-learning safety layer that reduces direct need for lecturer supervision during class demonstrations. Students benefit from safe, low-cost, first-hand exposure to the exposure and pattern-transfer stage of IC and PCB fabrication, closing a persistent gap between semiconductor theory and practical understanding. SLIDeX is directly deployable to electrical and electronic engineering programmes across universities and polytechnics, and its modular design allows scaling into vocational skills-training kits aligned with the national semiconductor workforce initiative under the Malaysian New Industrial Master Plan 2030.