It\u2019s that time of year again \u2013 the SPIE Advanced Lithography Symposium in sunny San Jose, California (so far, it\u2019s been raining constantly since I arrived). Attendance is expected to be about 4,000 again this year, with about 700 papers in five parallel conferences, and over 82,000 bottles of beer consumed (all right, I made that last number up).<\/p>\n
As usual, I plan to blog each day about my impressions of the conference. It\u2019s Sunday night, and I just finished teaching an 8 hour class (something I\u2019ve been doing here for over 15 years) as a rolling start to the symposium. So it is with both tired feet and a sore voice that I\u2019ll start off the conference tomorrow by attending the plenary session.<\/p>\n
And I\u2019m feeling nostalgic this year. In February of 1983 I started my first job in semiconductor lithography. Now it is 25 years later, and yes, I am feeling just a little bit older, a little bit wiser, and more than a little bit self-absorbed (if you don\u2019t believe me, just check out my website). What I don\u2019t feel like is finished. There are so many interesting problems to work on in lithography! There is so much work yet to do. My dilemma this year is not much different from my dilemmas of the past \u2013 of all the interesting things to work on, which one first?<\/p>\n
But nonetheless, I think I\u2019ll take this 25 year anniversary as an opportunity to tell a story: just exactly how did I manage to find myself working in the field of lithography? After all, when I was first told I was going to work on lithography, I had to look up the spelling of the word. My path to where I am now is anything but direct. So, in \u201cinstallment\u201d form over the next few days, I\u2019ll tell the story of how I become a lithographer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s that time of year again \u2013 the SPIE Advanced Lithography Symposium in sunny San Jose, California (so far, it\u2019s been raining constantly since I arrived). Attendance is expected to be about 4,000 again this year, with about 700 papers in five parallel conferences, and over 82,000 bottles of beer consumed (all right, I made […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-microlithography"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=110"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}