For the last 20 years, my routine for the beginning of the SPIE Advanced Lithography Symposium has been the same. Fly in to San Jose on Saturday, go out for a nice dinner with friends I haven’t seen in a while, and then teach a full-day short course on Sunday. This year that routine was interrupted by a 24-hour virus that hit me Saturday night. After a very unpleasant night, I spent Sunday in bed. To all those who signed up to take my course, possibly flying in a day early and taking up a precious weekend day to learn about lithography, I sincerely apologize.

Fortunately, the 24-hour bug is on schedule, and I feel well enough to attend the conference. Registration is up nearly 10% this year, continuing the five-year trend in growth for this conference. What can we expect to see this year? Of course, we all want to hear about progress in extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography. I expect the same result as last year: steady, but too slow. And what about the dark horse, directed self-assembly (DSA)? Progress on DSA over the last few years has been faster than I expected. Will that be true again this year? And after the interesting announcement 10 days ago that Cannon is buying Molecular Imprints, it will be interesting to hear about progress in nanoimprint lithography (NIL). I suspect, however, we won’t hear much on that front until next year, when the Toshiba-driven NIL development project comes to fruition.

The Bet. I regularly get questions about “the bet”. Five years ago at this conference I made a bet with Vivek Bakshi about when (or if) EUV would be used in manufacturing. The details are fuzzy (there was much beer involved), and Vivek and I don’t quite agree as to what we agreed to. Vivek said he thought EUV would be ready for manufacturing in 2013 – 2014. I said no way. Thus became the bet. I now claim victory, because I remember the bet as being EUV manufacturing in 2013. He remembers EUV by 2014, and so has ten more months to go. I’m willing to concede the disagreement on date, since it does not diminish my confidence in winning. And what will I win? That, too, is a bit fuzzy. I remember betting my Lotus, but don’t quite recall what Vivek put up. I’m sure we’ll figure it out by this time next year.

The Prediction. Last year I gave the Keynote talk at the Design for Manufacturability through Design-Process Integration conference. In that talk I predicted the end of Moore’s Law. Not exactly, news, I know. After all, to quote Gordon Moore, no exponential is forever. But I was specific in my prediction. Very specific. I predicted that Moore’s Law would end on Wednesday, Feb. 26, 2014, just before the poster session. With a prediction like that, only two outcomes are possible: I will forever more be consider a prescient sage, second only to Gordon Moore himself in my tech trend spotting abilities, or I’ll look like a fool. Personally, I’m OK either way. So if you are around, please join me Wednesday at the poster session where we’ll make a toast to the end of Moore’s Law.

Let the conference begin!