I began the second day with a four mile run on the beach, watching Venus and the crescent moon disappear as the sun rose behind the city of Monterey. Glorious. I ran with Charlie King, and had trouble keeping up with him. But then, he is so much younger than me.

Since I was way behind on finishing up the paper I had to give in the afternoon, I missed most of the morning talks. There were some very nice talks in the afternoon, but unfortunately mine was the only one on my favorite topic – line-edge roughness. My conclusion: mask writer-induced line-edge roughness cannot be ignored.

Best new product acronym: LAIPH – Luminescent Automated Image Processing Hub. The author pronounced it as “life” but it looks more like it should be pronounced “laugh”. It’s good to see that Luminescent is spending their money on engineering rather than marketing.

My broken record: I’m sorry to say that the lower number of papers at the conference has not resulted in a lower number of papers containing graphs with no numbers on the x and y axes. Why would someone show a graph in their presentation that contains absolutely no information? I don’t get it.

I enjoyed the dueling papers by KLA-Tencor and the German mask shop AMTC, where KLA showed that more measurement data was needed to know that a photomask was in spec, and the mask shop countered that less data was needed (their masks are just that good!). I found the KLA-Tencor paper (which used a non-KLA measurement tool, by the way) more convincing.

The day ended with the conference banquet, but with something missing. No entertainment. 2005 was the last year with true BACUS entertainment (skits and songs by industry insiders full of corny insider jokes). The demise of the entertainment is a long story – maybe I’ll tell it (from my perspective) someday. But I do miss it. If you have never seen it, or want to be reminded of it, check out these pictures from the days when I was a part of the cast.