Aloha is a great word. I enjoy the word first because when you use it or hear it, chances are you are on Hawaii. It is also wonderful for its marvelous ambiguity – it is used for both hello and goodbye, but means literally love and peace. It is both a word and a sentiment that I wish to use more often.

And I got to use it during the last two weeks of June, where for the third year in a row I attended Vivek Bakshi’s Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography workshop. The workshop was held at the Makena Beach and Golf Resort – formally the Maui Prince before they went bankrupt last fall (it is now owned by Wells Fargo). It is a resort in the old style, grand and beautiful, but with its glory somewhat faded, and its best days in the past. It is unclear when or how or if it will reemerge as financially successful. A metaphor for optical lithography?

After teaching a half-day introductory litho course on Tuesday, the workshop began early on Wednesday morning with a keynote talk by Jos Benschop of ASML. I learned that everything is progressing according to plan for ASML (are you surprised?). The critical next step for them is the delivery of the six “preproduction” EUV scanners that are now being built. The goal is to print the first wafer at a customer site with the first of these tools by the end of this year. Subsequent preproduction tools will roll out roughly every two months. Thus, 2011 will be a critical year for ASML, and for EUV lithography in general. Customers will experience what EUVL will be like in a roughly production-like environment. By the end of 2011, then, chip makers will be ready to make a very critical choice: buy multiple production EUVL tools from ASML for delivery in 2012, or not. It is not an overstatement to say that the future of EUV lithography will depend on the overall performance of the technology using these preproduction tools. If progress on the critical issues of source, masks and resists over the next 12 – 18 months is not sufficient, the technology could easily be abandoned by the industry, much the way 157-nm lithography was dropped in 2003.

Obert Wood of Global Foundaries gave the next talk. He has been painstakingly using the ASML alpha-demo tool (ADT) at SEMATECH in Albany to gain production experience with EUV lithography. This is not easy to do, however, when your scanner has a throughput of one wafer per hour. Obert also received Vivek’s lifetime achievement award for his 25 years of effort in the pursuit of EUV lithography (beginning at Bell Labs, back when it was called “soft x-ray”). Congratulations to Obert, a scientist that I respect for working diligently on a technology without becoming an advocate or losing his scientific objectivity.

My main research interest of late has been line-edge roughness, so I reported on the latest developments in my modeling efforts (much progress, but even more left to do). I also was very happy to hear Takahiro Kozawa and Seiichi Tagawa of Osaka University give papers on their seminar work in understanding the radiation chemistry of EUV resists. My good friend Mark Smith gave a talk as well (I had been needling him to come to this workshop for years), and I was happy that we were able to go snorkeling together just before he rushed off to the airport to make it home for his anniversary (thus cutting his trip to Hawaii short but preserving marital harmony). The value of an intimate workshop setting is in the interactions with the other attendees, and this workshop proved quite valuable to me in this regard. The 50 or so attendees included colleagues and friends both new and old.

As always, I brought my family and stayed for an extra week on the island. A bit of paradise in your life every now and again never hurts.