Wim Troost, who passed away last Friday, fought a fierce battle within Philips to keep the wafer stepper alive. With luck, wisdom and the right support from those around him, it was just enough.
In early 1978, the wafer stepper came up as the last item on the agenda at the annual meeting of the management teams of Philips’ Natuurkundig Laboratorium (Natlab) and the main Science & Industry (S&I) industrial group. The Silicon Repeater, as the machine was called, was then seven years into the research stage. The Natlab management thought it was time to turn it into a commercial device. The obvious choice for the job was S&I. After all, this business unit developed instruments from microscopes to measuring and control equipment.
No one at the incandescent lamp manufacturer had any appetite for its own lithography machines in the late 1970s. Both the research groups at Natlab and the product divisions preferred to use commercially available equipment. But after an awkward silence, someone raised his hand at the annual meeting: Wim Troost, one of S&I’s business unit directors, saw something in the stepper.
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