The first day of the conference was an exciting one for me. I was honored and humbled to become the 6th winner of the Frits Zernike Award for Microlithography. I’ll have more to say about this later, but there is no doubt that this moment was one of the highlights of my career.

The plenary talks were exceptional this year, especially the last two. Here are some of my favorite phrases and quotes:

Lisa Su, Freescale: “Lithography-induced complexity”

Gilad Almogy, Applied Materials: “2009 will likely be the worst year ever for our industry.”

Bernie Meyerson, IBM: “Where have all the GHz gone?”
“Atoms don’t scale.”
“Scaling is dead. Moore’s Law isn’t.”
The Albany EUV alpha-demo tool “looks like you rolled an electromagnet through an automotive junkyard.”

When the conference sessions began, I attended the resist conference. It was great to witness the presentation of the first Jeff Byers Best Poster Award. I am extremely gratified to see Jeff’s memory honored in this way, though I’m sure Jeff would have shook his head in disbelief at the mere thought of such a thing! Thanks to the resist conference organizers for creating this wonderful award. At the end of the first session, just before lunch, Cliff Henderson inserted into his talk a 70th birthday recognition for Grant Willson, including beautiful collage picture of Grant and ending with a rousingly off-key rendition of the Happy Birthday song. Congratulations Grant! It’s fun to see you embarrassed.

The afternoon papers did not generate much excitement for me, and I guess I am so used to it now that I didn’t even get riled up when I saw the graphs with no numbers on the axes or the study that compared “material A” to “material B” and found, amazingly, that material A was better.

In the evening, I stood by my two posters for two and a half hours – tiring but fun. The good thing about the low attendance is that the poster session was actually manageable this year – the crowds were not so great and one could easily navigate through the isles and see the posters. Not that I did. The disadvantage of giving a poster is that you don’t get to see any of the others. Still, I had many great discussions with people who came by.

The day ended with dinner (and beer) at Gordon Biersch. A day in heaven for a lithographer.