Midweek in the conference the adrenaline of the first few days begins to wear off. Combine that with a few nights in a row with less sleep than desired and all of a sudden sitting through six papers in a row starts to seem like work. I focused on all things LER on Wednesday, trying to find the Resist Conference papers that weren’t so packed with chicken-wire diagrams and 100-letter chemical names that mere mortals might be able to understand them. I think I’m making the same comment as last year: I’m amazed at how slow our progress is at understanding the fundamental mechanisms of line-edge roughness. There is a good chance that LER will be the ultimate limiter of lithographic resolution – why isn’t the industry putting more effort into the science of it?

In the Optical Lithography session, John Petersen’s talk on interference lithography (a topic I have worked on in the past) was well received. I agree with Bruce Smith’s comment: this technology has been too long neglected.

In the evening I skipped the DfM or MfD or f-in MD or whatever it was called panel and went straight for the hospitality suites (which were more plentiful than the previous night). The Hitachi party included a routine by the stand-up comedian Don McMillan (the power-point comedian and former chip designer). He was extremely funny, as always, and the sake was excellent. Thanks to Hitachi for being such a good host.