Science vs. Engineering:
“Science is about understanding the origins, nature, and behavior of the universe and all it contains; engineering is about solving problems by rearranging the stuff of the world to make new things.”
– Henry Petroski, IEEE Spectrum, December 2010
BGO – blinding glimpse of the obvious
(From a meeting today, where I heard approximately 50 acronyms of unknown meaning.)
A few years ago, while we were drinking in a basement beer bar in Yokohama, some Japanese friends decided to figure out how to spell my last name in Kanji. Generally, a foreigner writing his name in Japanese would use the Katakana alphabet. But occasionally foreigners will “spell” their name in Kanji, the Chinese characters that Japanese use for many of their words. The goal is to match the sounds made by the characters to the name (for me, the two sounds are ma + ku). But since the Kanji have meaning as well as sound, and there are usually several Kanji with the same sound, one can also choose the Kanji to provide a meaning that in some way reminds you of the person. After some discussion (that I didn’t understand) and some beer (that I did), a final spelling was agreed upon. Here is my name in Kanji. I like it.
Today is election day in the United States – finally. I’m sick of hearing about the state of politics in America, and am just looking forward to moving on. But there has been one bit of political news that I have found intriguing. This fall there was a lithographer who ran for Congress – in Brazil. His name is Ricardo Vieira, and I have been in email contact with him over the years on various lithography topics. When he first started campaigning, he told me, “We don’t have any representative from the scientific workers class into our Congress, so I decided to be a candidate.” He played up his experience in Nanotechnology to promote his campaign, even creating what might be the world’s smallest campaign slogan – “Vote Ricardo Vieira” printed so small that it is completely visible through the eye of a needle.
For pictures and more information, click here.
The other day my three-year-old daughter Anna saw an Apple iPad for the first time. After seeing if for just a few seconds, she looked at me and said “Why does he have that big iPhone?” While lots of people have talked about the proper way to think about the iPad in the spectrum of computing products, I think my daughter got it right at first glance. It is a big iPhone, only without the phone.
“Red is the color of love.”
– Anna Mack, my just-turned-three year old daughter, when asked what color sprinkles she wanted on her birthday cake.
I am now back in Austin, after spending the summer working for Dow Chemical (the Shipley photoresist group) in Marlborough, MA. Besides enjoying the much more pleasant temperatures of that northeastern clime, I had the great pleasure of getting to know (or know better) many fine folks at Dow (most especially my supervisor Jim Thackerary, whom I have known for 20 years, but now know of his favorite curse after a bad golf shot). One of the people I was glad to interact with was George Barclay, the R&D head for Dow Advanced Materials. Thus, I was a bit amused when, on the flight home to Austin, I opened up my current issue of Scientific American and there, staring at me thoughtfully from the inside cover, was an overly artistic rendering of that very same George Barclay. Dow is running an ad campaign to bring the “Human Element” of Dow to life. Thanks to the talents of the famous (and very expensive) photographer Albert Watson, Dr. Barclay has earned his new moniker: Gorgeous George.
A scene that I witnessed yesterday:
Congressman Barney Frank to (unnamed Intel litho engineer): “Your fly is down.”
Like many lithographers who have been at this business for a while, I frequently ran into Franco Cerrina, longtime professor at the University of Wisconsin, at conferences (mostly the 3-beam conferences). He was friendly, smart, hard working, and one was always glad to see him and for the chance to talk to him. He worked for many years on X-ray lithography, and has more recently applied himself to using nanofabrication techniques in biology. I recently reread some of his line-edge roughness papers, since he and his students did some of the early work in that area. He moved to Boston University last year to head up the EE department. Since I am spending the summer working in Boston, I had planned to call him up to visit him, to see what he was up to. It came as a shock to learn that he died in a photonics lab at BU on Monday. He was 62, rode his bike in to work every day, and apparently was in good health. More details can be found at:
http://www.bu.edu/ece/2010/07/13/professor-franco-cerrina-ece-chair-dies/
http://www.engr.wisc.edu/news/headlines/2010/Jul12.html
He will be missed by the lithography community.
Aloha is a great word. I enjoy the word first because when you use it or hear it, chances are you are on Hawaii. It is also wonderful for its marvelous ambiguity – it is used for both hello and goodbye, but means literally love and peace. It is both a word and a sentiment that I wish to use more often.
And I got to use it during the last two weeks of June, where for the third year in a row I attended Vivek Bakshi’s Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography workshop. The workshop was held at the Makena Beach and Golf Resort – formally the Maui Prince before they went bankrupt last fall (it is now owned by Wells Fargo). It is a resort in the old style, grand and beautiful, but with its glory somewhat faded, and its best days in the past. It is unclear when or how or if it will reemerge as financially successful. A metaphor for optical lithography?
After teaching a half-day introductory litho course on Tuesday, the workshop began early on Wednesday morning with a keynote talk by Jos Benschop of ASML. I learned that everything is progressing according to plan for ASML (are you surprised?). The critical next step for them is the delivery of the six “preproduction” EUV scanners that are now being built. The goal is to print the first wafer at a customer site with the first of these tools by the end of this year. Subsequent preproduction tools will roll out roughly every two months. Thus, 2011 will be a critical year for ASML, and for EUV lithography in general. Customers will experience what EUVL will be like in a roughly production-like environment. By the end of 2011, then, chip makers will be ready to make a very critical choice: buy multiple production EUVL tools from ASML for delivery in 2012, or not. It is not an overstatement to say that the future of EUV lithography will depend on the overall performance of the technology using these preproduction tools. If progress on the critical issues of source, masks and resists over the next 12 – 18 months is not sufficient, the technology could easily be abandoned by the industry, much the way 157-nm lithography was dropped in 2003.
Obert Wood of Global Foundaries gave the next talk. He has been painstakingly using the ASML alpha-demo tool (ADT) at SEMATECH in Albany to gain production experience with EUV lithography. This is not easy to do, however, when your scanner has a throughput of one wafer per hour. Obert also received Vivek’s lifetime achievement award for his 25 years of effort in the pursuit of EUV lithography (beginning at Bell Labs, back when it was called “soft x-ray”). Congratulations to Obert, a scientist that I respect for working diligently on a technology without becoming an advocate or losing his scientific objectivity.
My main research interest of late has been line-edge roughness, so I reported on the latest developments in my modeling efforts (much progress, but even more left to do). I also was very happy to hear Takahiro Kozawa and Seiichi Tagawa of Osaka University give papers on their seminar work in understanding the radiation chemistry of EUV resists. My good friend Mark Smith gave a talk as well (I had been needling him to come to this workshop for years), and I was happy that we were able to go snorkeling together just before he rushed off to the airport to make it home for his anniversary (thus cutting his trip to Hawaii short but preserving marital harmony). The value of an intimate workshop setting is in the interactions with the other attendees, and this workshop proved quite valuable to me in this regard. The 50 or so attendees included colleagues and friends both new and old.
As always, I brought my family and stayed for an extra week on the island. A bit of paradise in your life every now and again never hurts.