It’s great to be back in Monterey! I’m at the 29th annual BACUS Photomask Technology Conference. This is its 10th year in Monterey, and unfortunately I’ve missed the last few years due to teaching commitments at UT. But I’m not teaching this fall, so I couldn’t pass on this one.
Monterey, California will always be a special place for me. I met my wife for the first time here seven years ago. And we got married in Monterey 15 months later. A beautiful town during a beautiful time of year. Oh yes, and the conference is usually a good one as well.
[Aside: BACUS is not a reference to the god of wine, despite the amount of that liquid consumed at the poster session each year. It is an antiquated acronym standing for the Bay Area Chrome Users Society – something I’ll bet that a majority of conference attendees don’t know.]
The day began with Mike Polcari, CEO of SEMATECH, giving the keynote address. He gave the standard compelling argument for collaborative research, and the standard not-so-compelling argument for EUV lithography. My favorite quote: “EUV is inevitable”. It reminds me of Mr. Smith from the movie The Matrix saying “Do you hear that? That is the sound of inevitability.” Surreal.
There was an abundance of papers coupling simulation with high resolution mask inspection images to automatically predict defect printability. I remember working on this eight years ago with Intel, back when nobody else would listen to the idea. Patience is a virtue. It could also be that every struggling OPC company with an aerial image model is desperately looking for a product that might sell.
Attendance at the conference this year is down, but not nearly as much as I would have expected. Maybe companies are anticipating the beginnings of a recovery. The mood is definitely less pessimistic (less pessimistic is the new optimistic), thinking that the worst is behind us. Let’s hope so.
I was there when we came up with the name BACUS (at a long-gone restaurant across El Camino Real from the also long-gone Bacchus Inn). Probably fewer people know that I was the designer of the BACUS logo, the one with all the little squares making up the name. I did the original – pre computer — by coloring in squares on graph paper.
Wow! Great story, Scott! Thanks for sharing it. Who else was there at that meeting? How much wine was consumed?
I don’t recall exactly, but it was likely my AMI bosses Paul Johnson and (maybe) Dave Angel, George Damon of Fairchild, Jim Reynolds (Micromask), Steve Dunbrack (Ultratech), maybe Jim Wiley (Master Images), and Jeremy Nichols (National).
It grew out of an existing inter-company effort to get a handle on questionable practices of the chrome blank suppliers, and to advance the industry technically. When one mask shop rejected a plate of blanks, they would often show up at another mask shop.
Since it was at the Marquis restaurant (co-owned by David – now of David’s at the SC Golf Course on Tasman – and his brother), lots of wine was consumed.
I was at that meeting and several before and after. I remember Scott designing the logo. The very first meetings were held at Fairchild in Mountain View courtesy of George Damon. As the group grew we started meeting at Paul Johnson’s house and the aforementioned restaurant. I remember being involved in putting together the first symposium at I believe the Sunnyvale Hilton. I was in charge of registration (badges, pens, notebooks, sign-in, etc.) It was a one day meeting and well attended. It grew from there.