Unfortunately, a personal commitment forced me to leave San Jose Thursday morning, and so I have missed what is usually one of the better days of talks and posters. Since I have nothing to report on Day 4, I’ll instead talk for a bit about the Zernike Award.

It was seven years ago that SPIE approached me with the idea of creating a major SPIE award in microlithography. I agreed to head up the effort, and gathered together a committee of other lithographers to establish the award process. Someone on the committee suggested naming the award after Frits Zernike, for three reasons. First, no major optical award had been named in his honor, even though the scientific contributions of this Nobel prize winner are legion. Second, the name has high recognition in the optical lithography community due to the ubiquitous use of the Zernike polynomial for describing lens aberrations. The third reason is more personal – Zernike’s son, Frits Zernike Jr., worked for many years in the field of lithography at Perkin-Elmer and later SVG Lithography before retiring. Some of us on the committee knew him, and when contacted he was very supportive of an award named for his father. In 2004 the first Frits Zernike Award for Microlithography was given to Burn Lin. After three years I stepped down as chair of the committee.

I’m the 6th Zernike Award winner. Which got me thinking – just which aberration is the 6th Zernike? A quick check (I looked it up in my textbook!) showed that it was 3rd order x-coma. So I decided that each Zernike winner should be named after the corresponding Zernike polynomial term. Here are the results:

Z1: Burn Lin – x-tilt
Z2: Grant Willson – y-tilt
Z3: Tim Brunner – defocus
Z4: David Williamson – astigmatism
Z5: Martin van den Brink – 45 degree astigmatism
Z6: Chris Mack – x-coma

So, if you aren’t already in a coma from 4+ days at the SPIE Advanced Lithography Symposium, it is time to start thinking about who should become Z7: y-coma.