It\u2019s great to be back in Monterey! I\u2019m at the 29th annual BACUS Photomask Technology Conference. This is its 10th year in Monterey, and unfortunately I\u2019ve missed the last few years due to teaching commitments at UT. But I\u2019m not teaching this fall, so I couldn\u2019t pass on this one.<\/p>\n
Monterey, California will always be a special place for me. I met my wife for the first time here seven years ago. And we got married in Monterey 15 months later. A beautiful town during a beautiful time of year. Oh yes, and the conference is usually a good one as well.<\/p>\n
[Aside: BACUS is not a reference to the god of wine, despite the amount of that liquid consumed at the poster session each year. It is an antiquated acronym standing for the Bay Area Chrome Users Society \u2013 something I\u2019ll bet that a majority of conference attendees don\u2019t know.]<\/p>\n
The day began with Mike Polcari, CEO of SEMATECH, giving the keynote address. He gave the standard compelling argument for collaborative research, and the standard not-so-compelling argument for EUV lithography. My favorite quote: \u201cEUV is inevitable\u201d. It reminds me of Mr. Smith from the movie The Matrix saying \u201cDo you hear that? That is the sound of inevitability.\u201d Surreal.<\/p>\n
There was an abundance of papers coupling simulation with high resolution mask inspection images to automatically predict defect printability. I remember working on this eight years ago with Intel, back when nobody else would listen to the idea. Patience is a virtue. It could also be that every struggling OPC company with an aerial image model is desperately looking for a product that might sell.<\/p>\n
Attendance at the conference this year is down, but not nearly as much as I would have expected. Maybe companies are anticipating the beginnings of a recovery. The mood is definitely less pessimistic (less pessimistic is the new optimistic), thinking that the worst is behind us. Let\u2019s hope so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s great to be back in Monterey! I\u2019m at the 29th annual BACUS Photomask Technology Conference. This is its 10th year in Monterey, and unfortunately I\u2019ve missed the last few years due to teaching commitments at UT. But I\u2019m not teaching this fall, so I couldn\u2019t pass on this one. Monterey, California will always be […]<\/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-156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-microlithography"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156","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=156"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}