Day 3 is the last day of the conference this year. Due to significantly lower abstract submittals, the meeting was shortened by a day. After a set of fairly good papers in the morning, the afternoon was filled solely with a panel discussion (which I skipped in order to get home early).

Overall BACUS was a good conference, but it is definitely a shadow of its former self. Its not just that attendance was down (close to 600, versus something like 1000 each year during the middle of this decade), the energy level of the conference was down as well. It was worthwhile, but not exciting; fun but not one of the highlights of my year. Of course most of the malaise is due to the economy, but part is due to the state of the technology as well. EUVL is making progress, but any rational person has to be very skeptical of its eventual success. Double patterning receives too many complaints about cost, and especially mask costs (a sensitive topic at this conference), to be excited about it. Imprint will likely play important niche roles in manufacturing, but won’t save CMOS. Mapper is interesting, but may be too late to be a big player. Where does that leave us? Not having as much fun as we used to.

But moods can change quickly (like when everyone realized almost simultaneously that immersion lithography was real). We’ll see what happens this spring, where the only thing that is inevitable is a smaller Advanced Lithography conference in San Jose.