Last Thursday, I found myself in Bellingham, Washington. Of course, no one goes to Bellingham – I just happened to be driving from Seattle to Vancouver, British Columbia (to attend a philosophy of science conference – I know, I have strange hobbies). Besides being a little bit hungry, I had no reason to stop and wouldn’t have given the exit from the highway another thought until I was struck by a nagging familiarity with the name of the town. Bellingham. Then it occurred to me – this was the home of SPIE, the optics professional society that hosts the two largest conferences in the semiconductor lithography world (BACUS, the former home of world-class geek entertainment, and Microlithography, now dubbed Advanced Lithography so that no one will think we are doing any of that mundane kind of microlithography we used to give papers on).

Bellingham, Washington. The place we Fed-ex our extremely overdue manuscripts in the hopes that they might still be included in the proceedings. The return address on the advanced program that we get in the mail every year telling us about the few papers we will go see and the many, many papers we will miss at the massive Microlithography (sorry, Advanced Lithography) symposium. The place where we assume real people sit and talk to us on the phone when call with a question, but of course we are never sure.

SPIE Headquarters. I don’t know anybody whose has ever been there. So I decided to go. I veered off the highway at the last minute, searched and finally found the very well hidden building that was nestled in the hills and trees of this small coastal Washington town. I asked for the people I know there – June Thompson, who used to manage the BACUS conference, and Brian Thomas, who spear-headed the effort to upsize Micro into Advanced. Luckily, they were both in town. June gave me a tour of the building (it’s very nice!), then indulged one of my (mostly) harmless obsessions and took me to a brewpub for lunch (I can say with confidence – there’s good beer to be found in Bellingham). I exchanged gossip with Brian (though, quite frankly, lithography gossip is pretty boring) and lent him a sympathetic ear as he complained about the problems running SPIE’s most successful conference. All in all, a nice time.

So if you find yourself driving up interstate 5 through Washington some day with a little time on your hands, stop by and say high to the folks at SPIE. They’re nice people, and they get lonely.

David Pan, a friend of mine and professor at UT Austin, told me recently “Moore’s Law isn’t dead – it’s just having a mid-life crisis.” Although I wrote an article a few years ago provocatively titled “The End of the Semiconductor Industry as We Know It”, I think David is right – our industry is in mid-life crisis. I can relate.

Gordon Moore penned his famous law in 1965, observing a doubling of the number of the transistors on a chip since the birth of the integrated circuit in 1960. Now it just so happens that I was born in 1960. I certainly don’t claim any cosmic connection to continuous semiconductor improvement due to this coincidence of birth dates, but it does mean that me and the technology driver of the Information Age share at least one thing – we are both getting old.

Now I certainly don’t feel ‘old’, or that my useful days are behind me, but I’m not young either. I can’t pull all-nighters anymore, they way I used to when I could start and finish a conference paper 12 hours before I gave it. I’m unwilling to put my life on hold when a customer calls and says he needs something yesterday. I can’t work in the fab – that’s a young person’s job. And yes, the cries of “mid-life crisis” could be heard from all of my friends when I bought that Lotus sports car last year. I’m definitely older, but I like to think that I’m wiser too, and that this wisdom is more than enough to make up for a little slowness in step. But is the same thing true of the IC industry? It better be, or things will get pretty ugly fast. Working harder and faster because we have to keep with Moore’s Law is not good enough any more. The IC industry took off because the early pioneers took the science of semiconductors and turned it into technology. For that technology to keep going, we’ll have to bring in a whole bunch of new science. Most of that science will come from the universities, unlike in the past when most innovations came from the IC companies. Increased support for univeristy research is needed now, and hopeful it is not already too late.

Moore’s Law is getting old – let’s hope it gets wise as well.

I just got back from visiting Grant Willson in the hospital here in Austin. One week ago, while driving to pick his wife up at the airport, he was hit head-on by a drunk driver.

Almost everybody working in the field of microlithography knows of Grant Willson. While at IBM he invented chemically amplified resists and has subsequently received every award I can think of for that work, including SPIE’s Frits Zernike Award for Microlithography, our field’s highest honor. For more than a decade he has been teaching at the University of Texas at Austin and his irreplaceable leadership in the education of scores of students has produced results that may even eclipse his scientific contributions. For those of us lucky enough to know Grant personally, he is affable, giving, and a man of the highest possible integrity.

The accident banged him up badly, crushing parts of his hip. When I saw him last Thursday, less than two days after the accident, he was in good spirits, but in obvious pain. Today he was much better, and he should be heading home soon (in typical Willson fashion, ahead of schedule). The hope is that after 2 – 3 months of physical therapy (learning how to walk again) he’ll be right as rain.

Best wishes for a speedy recovery, Grant.

If you have poked around my site much, you may have noticed a section on the history of semiconductor lithography. It still needs a lot of work, so anyone who has any good information to share, I would appreciate it.

In particular, I’m trying to find out the year and circumstance around the purchase of the David W. Mann Company (maker of photorepeaters for mask making) by GCA (who eventually turned the technology into wafer steppers). Any and all help would be appreciated.

The SPIE Microlithography Symposium is without question the premier annual conference in the field of semiconductor microlithography. But all is not well in litho conference land. Many of the papers are simply not worth listening to. Of course, with any event this big you have to expect a range of quality in technical papers – to get the good one must accept the bad and the ugly. As the conference has grown over the years, the very good papers have stayed very good. But the bad papers have gotten worse, and the average quality of papers at the conference has steadily declined as the conference has grown. The reason for this is clear to me: an increased influence of sales and marketing goals over technical goals. With the conference’s growth in size has come a growth in influence, and a desire by many to control that influence.

What can be done to fix this problem? I’ve written a short whitepaper, A Modest Proposal, with concrete recommendations that I believe can improve paper quality. If you disagree, please let me know. If you agree, please let the conference organizers know.

I’ve just put the first batch of cartoons by Kit Auschnitt on my web page. They are part of a section I call the Lighter Side of Lithography. Kit’s cartoons are great, capturing the true geek-humor of the hard-core lithographer. Worth checking out.

You’ve got to hand it to them – those science editors at the Economist sure know how to spot a trend. In an article last week called The Cutting Edge, they showed a Moore’s law-like plot of the number of razor blades in a shaver over time. It is super-exponential, making extroplation difficult, but if the trend continues (and don’t all trends continue?) we should expect 14 blades in our razors some time between this Christmas and the year 2100.

Don’t believe everything you read. It’s a truism no rational person would disagree with. But how does it apply to published scientific research?
When teaching my graduate level lithography class at the University of Texas, I often caution my students about excessive faith in published research. “Half of what is published in the lithography literature is wrong,” I would often say. I have no data to support this claim, but after reading thousands of published papers over the last 23 years I think that number is in the ball park. I’ve recently read a published scientific paper (yes, the irony is thick here) that puts some scientific backing to the claim that most published research is wrong. John P. A. Ioannidis’s paper “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” is fascinating – a must read for anyone involved in research. Published in the peer-reviewed open access journal PLoS Medicine (August, 2005), the paper is slanted towards medical studies, but the principles apply to all of science. When is data sufficiently strong to justify the statement that it supports either the acceptance or rejection of a proposed hypothesis? Most of the time, he claims, the data supports neither statement.
The conclusion? Science definitely moves forward, but a healthy dose of skepticism is justified.

Recently posted on the web: “SST On the Scene at the SPIE Microlithography Conference – 2006” – video interviews of numerous lithographers, where my ugly mug can be seen in two different interviews. (If looking at me too often frightens you and you need a good-looking face to compensate, check out Kurt Ronse.)

I’ve just added a new page to my web site under Published Works called Chris’s Recent Papers. The goal is to put the last few papers I’ve written here for easy access (as links to the papers or PDFs to download). If I keep writting these kinds of papers, the list should change frequently. Here is what is up there now:

What’s So Hard About Lithography?
Accuracy, speed, new physical phenomena: The future of litho simulation
Methods for Benchmarking Photolithography Simulators: Part IV
Fast lithography simulation under focus variations for OPC and layout optimizations
From Data to Decisions