There is one day left in the microlithography conference, but not for me. I am catching a flight back to Austin this morning, leaving the last day of the conference to lithographers hardier than myself. And I leave with mixed feelings. This conference is always amazing, for the collection of people and their interactions, for the scope and depth of technical topics discussed, and for the undeniable impact that this week has on the direction of our industry. But it is also disappointing, because the conference does not live up to its potential. The problem statement is simple, though the solution is not: about half of the oral papers are not worth listening to. Too little technical content, and too much marketing message. How much knowledge do I gain when a resist vendor tells me that \u201cMaterial A\u201d with \u201cHigh Index Fluid 1\u201d outperforms \u201cMaterial B\u201d with \u201cHigh Index Fluid 2\u201d? How is my job affected by learning that an EDA startup has a new litho model (soon to be available) that is fast and accurate, but they won\u2019t talk about the model, or how they measure speed and accuracy? They should spend money on a booth at the Technical Exhibit if they want to give that kind of a sales pitch.
\nThe difference between a marketing pitch and a technical paper is obviously technical content. And in a scientific conference, technical content is judged by, among other factors, whether enough information is given so that others can reproduce the work. It is one of the foundations of the scientific process. Papers that talk about \u201cresist A\u201d and \u201ctool B\u201d are useless. Papers that simply show off a company\u2019s product don\u2019t fit here. Saying \u201cI can\u2019t discuss that information, it\u2019s proprietary\u201d is an indication that the discussion does not belong in an open forum. The standards for papers at this conference are on the decline. I hope the conference chairs decide that bigger is not always better and try to do something to limit the marketing fluff that surrounds and hides the true gems \u2013 the real technical papers \u2013 that can still be found during SPIE Microlithography week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There is one day left in the microlithography conference, but not for me. I am catching a flight back to Austin this morning, leaving the last day of the conference to lithographers hardier than myself. And I leave with mixed feelings. This conference is always amazing, for the collection of people and their interactions, for […]<\/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-17","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-microlithography"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17","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=17"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}