I am comfortably back in my home on a rainy Saturday afternoon in Austin (this is Texas \u2013 we love the rain here). In a couple more days I should be fully recovered from the week\u2019s stresses and strains. At least physically.
\nIt was a busy week. And a big one. My contacts at SPIE tell me the conference had over 4,200 attendees coming to watch about 860 technical papers (compare that with about 100 attendees and 26 papers thirty years ago). That translates into heavy-duty information overload for conference attendees and lots of money for the conference organizer, SPIE. The average cost to semiconductor companies to send a person to the conference is probably $3,000 \u2013 $4,000 when the salary of the person is figured in. Accounting for students, technical exhibit only attendees, locals, and people who only come for a small part of the week, the industry is still spending on the order of $10 million just to send people to the conference (though of course the supplier companies probably spend a comparable amount for booths, hospitality suites, and customer dinners). Even for a $250 billion industry, that\u2019s not chump change. Is it worth the money?
\nThe answer is obviously yes. This is an important week \u2013 essential even \u2013 for lithographers. What is at stake here is significant beyond semiconductor revenue growth. The future of Moore\u2019s Law is in the balance. Don\u2019t get me wrong \u2013 I\u2019m not trying to say that if you let more lithographers play in the scientific sandbox the world\u2019s technological progress will be assured. Or even that scaling transistor dimensions according to the tradition of Moore\u2019s Law is needed for progress. Industry advancements will occur whether lithographers keep pushing resolution down for another decade or hit a brick wall next year. But the nature of competition, growth, and progress in semiconductors, computers, entertainment and all of electronics will be affected by what lithographers can accomplish over the next few years. If you\u2019re behind, it will be hard to catch up. But if you\u2019re at the front of the pack, the future is yours to make.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I am comfortably back in my home on a rainy Saturday afternoon in Austin (this is Texas \u2013 we love the rain here). In a couple more days I should be fully recovered from the week\u2019s stresses and strains. At least physically. It was a busy week. And a big one. My contacts at SPIE […]<\/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-18","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-microlithography"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18","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=18"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}