Last year SPIE published a book I wrote called the Field Guide to Optical Lithography. No, it doesn’t contain any illustrations of the plumage of the male lithographer during courting. SPIE picked the title – it is one of a series of field guides on optical topics. Of course, they are selling the book here this week, but I was a little surprised to see their method of advertising – a pair of 8 foot tall posters each with a giant photo of my graying, smiling head. I find them a little disconcerting to look at, so I can only imagine their impact on the general lithography book-buying public. Mark Smith threatened to take a marker and write “actual size” on the posters next to my picture. Isn’t that what friends are for?

It’s always fascinating to see which sessions are hot and which are not. Last year, a session entitled “polarization and hyper-NA effects” would have been packed. This year it was empty. Not only that, but all of the papers were essentially the same (how many ways can we rewrite the Jones matrix?). The industry tends to work like that – as a mob, recognizing and working on the same problems at about the same time. We spent the year working on vector pupils, now we are done. The ‘hot’ topic this year? Double patterning, of course. Standing room only during that session.

My favorite papers so far:

On Monday in the metrology session, Tim Brunner put scattering bars too close to a feature in order to do what lithographers never want to do – make the NILS low. The result – a pattern with extreme sensitivity that can be used as a focus and exposure ‘canary’ monitor.

In the resist session on Tuesday, John Biafore explained some of the stochastic phenomena behind line edge roughness – including totally cool movies that illustrated the main effects in a way an equation never will.

Bernd Geh made sense of the Jones matrix on Tuesday in the optical lithography conference – something I thought couldn’t be done.