Throwing a single stone into the waves will not affect the ocean. But throw a million or ten million stones, and a small island might grow. And what if billions or trillions of stones were thrown? The small island could become a continent, offering new living space where nothing but the sea existed before.

Now think of the transistor, invented in the 1940s, as that first stone. The massive changes that have taken place in our world since then are like the continent springing up where nothing existed before. Computer chips containing millions of transistors, each only 10 to 20 square millimeters in size, are manufactured in the billions each year. Total shipments of personal computers (PCs) to date have surpassed a billion units, but chips are not only used in PCs. They are vital components in digital cameras, copying machines, telephones, TVs, cars and network equipment. And now we are witnessing the birth of yet a new world, in which chips exchange information with other chips.

Behind these changes, making all of them possible, are ongoing advancements in semiconductor production technologies. The keys to expanding the density of circuits at the current rate of two times about every 18 months are the production process known as photolithography and the exposure devices known as steppers that apply this process.

These devices rapidly expose large volumes of circuit patterns on silicon wafers with incredible precision. They symbolize the semiconductor industry in the same way that oil thieves (machines that remove oil from underground sources) represent the petroleum industry, and blast furnaces represent the steel industry. Today, we talk to a few of the Canon engineers who strive to raise the performance of semiconductor production equipment on a scale that, even if you magnified a circuit 1,000 times, would still measure less than a millimeter.