Abstract: The exposure component (10) of a photo-etching system for a semiconductor wafer (28) includes a laser (12) that shines coherent light through an expansion lens (14) and then a contraction lens (16) to supply a spherically convergent beam of light through a lensless-Fourier-transform hologram (22) and onto the semiconductor wafer (28). The wafer (28) is located tangent to a hemisphere centered on the hologram (22) that has the focal point (26) of the convergent spherical beam at the middle of its curved surface. This forms a reduced version of the source image from which the hologram (22) was formed and achieves feature sizes significantly smaller than those attainable with conventional mask-type systems employing light of the same wavelength.