The symposium is finally at its end, with a half-day of “tool” papers on Friday. Unlike the rest of the week, the Friday morning papers are, for all practical purposes, reserved spots evenly divided among the major optical projection tool manufacturers, with a few subsystem providers thrown in for good measure. The quality of papers is usually mixed, and this year was no exception. Technical content tends to be low, and that is not necessarily bad, since my brain became full sometime on Thursday. Still, marketing content is too high, too many graphs are shown without labels on the axes, and the point of any given paper on Friday is not always clear. But it is useful to hear about tool roadmaps and get a sense for how hard the various suppliers are striving for technical leadership.

After a week of high energy, the 2007 SPIE Advanced Lithography Symposium didn’t come to a climatic finish, but instead faded away as the 4,000+ total attendees dwindled to a few hundred by the last talk. Granted, 200 people would be a great turnout for the vast majority of SPIE-sponsored meetings, so this shouldn’t seem like a complaint at all. But each year I walk away from the last paper with just a little sadness, knowing it will be another year before the excitement returns.