Two stage method

The invention relates to lithography instruments used for patterning and processing substrates such as semiconductor chips and wafers. More specifically, the invention is concerned with a method for positioning stages during the processing of the substrates affixed to those stages. The method for positioning two stages during semiconductor wafer processing facilitates the use of two stages to improve system throughput by decreasing the rest-time of certain system components. While a typical single-stage apparatus requires that each step in the process be performed serially, this invention allows an amount of parallel processing with each stage at different steps of the process, and thus improves system throughput.