The soft bake is the most important of the bake steps for stress formation. It is performed after spin coating. Its function is to remove the solvent from the resist and make the layer solid. Typically at least 5% of the solvent remains in the layer after the soft bake, however the thicker the coating, the harder it becomes to remove the solvent, as evaporating solvent through thick layers becomes increasingly difficult with coating thickness. The bake is performed on a programmable hot plate to reduce the skinning effect of solvent depletion at the surface creating a dense layer which makes the remainder of the solvent more difficult to remove. In order to reduce stress, the bake procedure is generally a two step process made up of holding at 65 °C before ramping to 95 °C and holding again for a time dependent on the layer thickness. The temperature is then lowered slowly to room temperature.