“The main lesson that I have learned over time is that a good scientist is a humble and listening scientist and not one that is sure 100 percent in what he reads in the textbooks.”
– Dr. Dan Shechtman, interviewed in the New York Times after learning that he had won the 2011 Noble Prize for Chemistry.
Believe it or not, one of the things I was looking forward to when I came back from New Zealand in August was to start running again with my old training group. Alas, the stark change from running in New Zealand to running in the Austin heat was not good for me. On my first run I hurt my knee. It didn’t hurt much so I didn’t pay much attention to it, but after running for two more weeks it was getting worse. I rested for two weeks, but it didn’t improve. So off to the doctor I went. After x-rays and an MRI, I found that I had torn the meniscus in two places. The net result is I go in for surgery a week from Monday. After that, 6 weeks of rehab should put me back in shape to run again – if all goes well. We’ll have to wait and see, but hopefully I’ll be back to training the first of December, possibly in time for races in February.
Could it be I’m suffering from RWO – running while old?
So you’ve got an old lithography tool hanging around. It doesn’t have the resolution (or any other spec) needed for production of pretty much anything that anyone wants to make. What can you do with it?
One option is to sell it to a Hollywood prop house. Apparently, that is what someone did with an old Cobilt mask aligner (at least, I think it is a Cobilt). It has probably shown up in several movies, but the one I saw it in was Silent Running, a good but not great sci-fi movie from 1972. Here are some shots from the movie.
Bruce Dern as Freeman Lowell limping past the mask aligner after murdering his crewmates.
Lowell using the mask aligner to reprogram the company droids to answer to him.
You can’t keep a good lithography tool down, not if you have a little imagination.
Oktoberfest is the German celebration of beer. In the days before refrigeration, Germans drank beer only in the cool weather months. Thus, Oktoberfest was the celebration of the availability of the first batch of beer after a long, dry summer. It is two weeks long, ending the first weekend in October (thus, most of Oktoberfest occurs in September).
The end of September is a common time for various beer celebrations. Here is a good one:
Texas Craft Brewers Festival
An Outdoor Beer Sampling Festival Dedicated to the Fine Art of Craft Brewing
September 24, 2011
2 – 8pm
Fiesta Gardens, Austin, TX
http://www.texascraftbrewersfestival.org/
“You can’t believe most of the quotes you read on the internet”
– Abraham Lincoln
After two months in New Zealand (and an inadvertent week in Australia), I’m back in Austin. Just in time to watch my home town break the previous record of 69 days above 100F (set in 1925). We will be way past that mark this year – the forecast calls for 110F on Saturday. But, as all of my friends here remind me, I am not allowed to complain (especially after emailing them pictures of snow last month). So I won’t.
I’ve always been suspicious when one’s ideology matches perfectly with one’s self interest. Do you really think in such a case that this ideology won out fairly in the great battle of ideas? More likely there was no battle at all. I have no respect for the Me Party, with their shouts of my rights and your responsibilities. So when I see someone promoting responsibility and fairness over self-interest, I take notice of such an increasingly rare event. Thus, with his recent New York Times editorial, I have one more reason to respect Warren Buffett.
It is one week before I head back to Austin after a two-month stay in New Zealand. While Texas is experiencing record heat and drought, Christchurch is having its second snow day this winter. Heavy snow falls here only about once every 10 years, so to have two big snow days three weeks apart is quite unusual. The University of Canterbury is closed today, but hopefully will be back to normal before my class on Wednesday. I expect major shock when I get off the plane in seven days.
Analogies with Moore’s Law abound. Virtually any trend looks linear on a log-linear plot if the time period is short enough. Some people hopefully compare their industry’s recent history to Moore’s Law, wishfully predicting future success with the air of inevitability that is usually attached to Moore’s Law. Others look to some past trend in the hopes of understanding the future of Moore’s Law. A common analogy of the latter sort is the trend of airplane speed in the last century.
Plotting the cruising speed of new planes against their first year of commercial use, the trend from the 1910s to the 1950s was linear on a log-scale, just like a Moore’s Law plot. But then something different happens. As airspeed approaches the speed of sound, the trend levels off – a physical limit changed the economics of air travel. The equivalent of Moore’s Law for air travel had ended.
For me, the interesting data point is the Concord Supersonic Transport (SST). First flown commercially in 1976, the Mach 2 jet was perfectly in line with the historical log-speed trend of the first 50 years of the industry. And the SST was a technical success – it did everything that was expected of it. Except, of course, make money. The economic limit had been reached, but that didn’t stop many bright people from insisting that the trend must continue, spending billions to make it so. But technological invention couldn’t change the economic picture, and supersonic transportation never caught on.
So here goes my analogy. I think extreme ultraviolet (EUV) will be the SST of lithography. I have little doubt that the technology can be made to work. If it fails (I hope it won’t, but I think it will), the failure will be economic. Like the SST, EUV lithography will never be economical to operate in a mass (manufacturing) market. We can do it, but that doesn’t mean we should.
Of course, this analogy is imperfect, as all such analogies are. Air travel went through just three doublings of speed in 50 years, as opposed to the 36 doublings of transistor count per chip in the last 50 years of semiconductor manufacturing. And the economics of the industries are hardly the same. Still, the analogy has enough weight to make one think. We’ll know soon enough – EUV lithography will likely succeed or fail in the next two years.
As an aside, the first time I heard someone mention the analogy between airspeed and transistor trends was in the early 1990s, when Richard Freeman of AT&T gave a talk. The subject of his presentation? Soft x-ray lithography, what we now call EUV.
Lithography lost one of its own on July 12 with the death of Frits Zernike Jr. to Parkinson’s disease. Here is his obit from the New York Times:
Born and educated in Groningen, the Netherlands. A physicist with Perkin-Elmer Corp., Silicon Valley Group and Carl Zeiss, and first manager for Dept. of Energy’s Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography Program. Survived by his wife of 49 years, Barbara Backus Zernike, children Frits III, Harry, and Kate, daughter- and son-in-law Jennifer Wu and Jonathan Schwartz, and three grandchildren: Frits and Nicolaas Schwartz and Anders Zernike. Memorial service will be 3pm Thursday, July 28, at Essex Yacht Club, Novelty Lane, Essex, CT. Donations in his memory may be made to Dance for Parkinson’s, c/o NMS, 100 Audubon St, New Haven, CT 06510, or Community Music School, P.O. Box 387, Centerbrook, CT 06409.
Here is an excerpt from a post I made to this blog on February 27, 2009 concerning Frits:
“It was seven years ago that SPIE approached me with the idea of creating a major SPIE award in microlithography. I agreed to head up the effort, and gathered together a committee of other lithographers to establish the award process. Someone on the committee suggested naming the award after Frits Zernike, for three reasons. First, no major optical award had been named in his honor, even though the scientific contributions of this Nobel prize winner are legion. Second, the name has high recognition in the optical lithography community due to the ubiquitous use of the Zernike polynomial for describing lens aberrations. The third reason is more personal – Zernike’s son, Frits Zernike Jr., worked for many years in the field of lithography at Perkin-Elmer and later SVG Lithography before retiring. Some of us on the committee knew him, and when contacted he was very supportive of an award named for his father.”