Day four requires significant effort to stay mentally focused.  For me, I think it is less of a “brain is full” phenomenon and more lack of sleep and too much beer.  There is also my frustration with the SPIE conference app and the lack of a printed program.  Regardless of who is to blame, I am sad that my morning confusion led me to miss Hank Smith’s talk.  I heard it was great, filled with zone plates, Uranium-238, and a 4.5 nm wavelength.  This picture by John Petersen captures the moment, with Hank soon to be introduced by Bruce Smith.

I’m not sorry, however, that I attended Karey Holland’s talk on resists and the semiconductor roadmap (a slide deck that will make great reference material), or Yasin Ekinci reviewing capabilities and results from the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) and its EUV interference tool. 

The second half of the morning was the traditional “tool session”, though it remains strange (and maybe even a little sad) that all the talks were given by ASML and Zeiss.  What the session showed quite clearly is that our industry is driven by the equally important activities of invention and incremental progress.  And no companies excel at both like ASML and Zeiss.  Inventions, like EUV scanners or high-NA EUV scanners, do not initially result in something useful for the industry.  Instead, they provide a platform, a foundation, for the incremental advances which turn those inventions into useful, then essential, tools.  Sometimes those incremental advances seem exceedingly slow (as progress in EUV tooling did in 2010), but persistence and a steady pace has a way of paying off.  That was on full display during this session.  The ASML “low-NA” production systems continue to improve in overlay performance and source power, as Peter Klomp and Qiushi Zhu showed.  Source power increases are described as throughput improvements, but they could be equally described as resolution improvements since the entitlement resolution of a 0.33 NA EUV system can only be realized with enough dose to overcome stochastic limitations.  Progress in the High-NA EUV tools, described by Herman Heijmerikx, Hilbert van Loo, and Claus Zahlten in separate talks, shows that this new platform for innovation is here.  Now begins the incremental advancement that will make it work for the industry.

By the afternoon I was session hopping again.  First the Etch conference to hear a talk by my friends at Sandbox Semiconductor and then to give one myself.  Then back to optical and EUV to hear Luciana Meli of IBM say “Co-optimization of all patterning technologies is required for stochastics,” while showing IBM’s progress in that co-optimization for high-NA EUV.  Finally, it was back to my home conference of metrology for the Late News session, where among others I saw Hitachi talk about their new CD-SEM, the GT 2000.

It was a race to the finish (so it seemed), then the week was over.  But the residue of ALP remains, firstly with the papers that I still have to finish writing, but mostly with the ideas that I have to work through to see where they lead.  Another great year!