It’s late on Thursday night, and I am exhausted. Only one half-day of conference to go. I gave my sole paper on Wednesday, and I am enjoying the idea of relaxing back at home rather than rushing to yet another paper.
But it was not always like this. 1993, in particular, was not like this.
I had the first paper slot on Friday morning of that year, for a paper entitled “Phase Contrast Lithography.” As usual, I was trying to finish it at the last minute, but things were just not coming together. My simulation results didn’t show many interesting effects, and while it is always worthwhile to give a paper that says “I looked at this idea, and it didn’t work out,” still, my intuition told me there should be something there. I just wasn’t finding it. Out of desperation my mind began to wander beyond the 90 degree phase-shifter/pupil filter idea that I was working on and I started scribbling down some equations. Within a few minutes I had derived an elegant result predicting a non-intuitive behavior of a 60 degree phase-shift mask and pupil filter combination.
I was ecstatic! I cranked up PROLITH to run some simulations and I began to write a whole new paper from scratch. It was midnight on Thursday night.
By 6 am I was running to Kinko’s with a floppy disk, desperately hoping it would take less than 2 hours for my powerpoint slides to print out as overhead transparencies. The acetate was still warm when I walked into the conference and started giving my talk. I’m still very proud of that paper.
That was 14 years ago, and such adrenaline-fueled excitement is now the pleasure of a younger generation of lithographers than myself. This year, I turned in my paper before I got on the plane for San Jose.
As a postscript, a few months after I gave that paper in 1993 I was reading through Born and Wolf’s classic textbook on optics when I ran across the very same equation I had derived with such late-night excitement. Ah well. There is very little new under the sun, and discovery is often actually rediscovery. But it’s still fun.