I haven’t been blogging a lot lately.

This is obvious to the 2.5 people that regularly check my blog to see what I have to say. But I have a reason (there is always a reason): Since the first of the year till the end of May I was extremely focused on one thing – finishing my textbook on optical lithography. I spent the month of June on the French Rivera on vacation, but more on that later. I’d like to talk about that pesky book first.

The title is Fundamental Principles of Optical Lithography: The Science of Microfabrication. Quite a mouthful. It is my Opus Magnum – just about everything I have learned about optical lithography over the last 24 years, including quite a bit of new, unpublished research. Amazingly, I’ve spent 17 of those 24 years writing this book! And for most of those years it has seemed that I was further away from finishing each year that went by (a testament to how fast the field changes). I finally realized that near full time effort was required to finish the book, which is what I have been (almost) doing for the last two years.

A few statistics about the book:

Number of pages: about 600
Number of chapters: 10
Number of figures: 272
Number of equations: 973
Number of homework problems: 132

It’s not exactly beach reading.

The publisher is John Wiley & Sons, and the book should come out towards the end of November. If it is a best seller (as far as such textbooks are concerned), I won’t even come close to making minimum wage for the time I spent writing it. But of course, nobody writes such a book for the money. It’s about the glory.