After graduating with my bachelors degrees in 1982, I spent the summer working in an optics lab at the National Security Agency and then went off to CalTech to work towards a degree in applied physics. But a funny thing happened on my way to a PhD. I got married (not a particularly wise decision for me at the age of 22) and realized I needed a break from school after four intense years as an undergrad. One semester at CalTech was enough – I dropped out. But now I needed a job.

Since I had spent the previous summer at NSA, I decided to call someone I knew in their HR/Recruiting office about the possibility of a permanent job. After a few phone interviews, I got a job offer from a brand new group – the Microelectronics Research Lab. I hopped on a plane to start a new career and a new life in Maryland.

There is something important to know about working for the NSA – it requires a Top Secret Special Intelligence security clearance. Such a clearance is not trivial to get. One takes a battery of psychological exams, personality tests, and a particularly unpleasant lie detector test. A very thorough background check is done, including interviews with friends, neighbors, teachers, etc. The whole process takes at least nine months, and typically one year. Fortunately, I had just gone through this ordeal in order to get my temporary job the previous summer. Thus, I already had a clearance. When I arrived at the beginning of February, 1983, they even let me skip the two week orientation class and I went straight to my new boss’s office.

Why is all of this important? My new boss didn’t realize that I already had a clearance, and so was expecting me to show up for work in about a year. She had not even begun to think about what I was supposed to do and how I would fit into the group. She gave me some busy work while she pondered my fate. In the meantime, another young engineer in the group noticed my boredom and took pity on me. He was trying to work on etch and deposition (though we were in a very crude lab – our clean room would take a few years to build), and had recently ordered a very small, very manual contact printer (almost a toy, really) so that he could make himself some test patterns. The contact printer arrived the week that I showed up, and to give me something to do, he pointed me to the box. Even though I couldn’t spell it, that week I become a lithographer.

I often wonder what might have happened to me and my life if a different piece of equipment had shown up that week – an electrical prober, or a wafer cleaner, maybe. In hindsight, it seems that lithography was ideal for my educational background and my temperament – something that could have been a perfect plan rather than a perfect fluke. And while my marriage (the thing that sent me into this job) did not last but a few years, lithography has stuck with me for 25 years. Go figure.

By the way, while I was waiting for our clean room to be built (don’t expect things to move fast in the government), I decided the best way to learn about lithography was through simulation. I read Rick Dill’s 1975 papers and fell in love with the idea of lithography simulation. I started to write my own simulator that summer. As they say, the rest is history.