I’ll begin on a serious note. This past year saw the passing of a great lithographer and good friend, Jeff Byers. His tragic death in November (due to injuries sustained in an auto accident) is still a shock to me. So I’m starting a viral campaign: anyone who feels a need to take a moment to honor Jeff’s memory, let’s meet at Gordon Biersch on Thursday, and at 9 pm raise a glass for him. I think he would have done the same for me.

The Symposium began with the awards before the plenary talks. The Frits Zernike prize was awarded to Martin van den Brink of ASML (way to go, Martin!), followed by the promotion of a record 8 lithographers to the rank of SPIE fellow. There were 21 lithography fellows before, so this is a big increase.

All three plenary talks were reasonably good – something that rarely happens. Here are my favorite quotes:

“ Lithography choices are critical and dangerous” – Mark Durcan, Micron
“Shrink is good.” – Martin van den Brink, ASML
“Designers need freedom from choice.” – Andrew Kahng, UC San Diego

With the start of regular talks, the exercise began. I raced back and forth between the resist and metrology sessions all day – probably 200 yards apart. My two big take-aways for the day: 1) third-generation high-index fluids (n > 1.8) may never have low enough absorption, and 2) metrology folks my know how to build metrology tools, but their analysis of data is relatively crude (and they are proud of it).

During the resist session, Ralph Dammel made a very nice tribute to Jeff Byers just before a paper in which Jeff was a co-author. Thank you, Ralph.

The Monday evening poster session was a mess as always. Too many people in a too-small space meant it was virtually impossible to visit even a small fraction of the posters. But as an experienced poster maven, I was prepared. I went through the posters an hour before the session opened and just dropped my card at any poster that looked interesting. I’ll read the papers when the authors email them too me. Then the poster session became a social event – something it works well as.