{"id":181,"date":"2010-06-04T15:51:54","date_gmt":"2010-06-04T20:51:54","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2014-05-21T14:43:43","modified_gmt":"2014-05-21T19:43:43","slug":"steve-thornton","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/?p=181","title":{"rendered":"Steve Thornton"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I met Steve Thornton almost exactly 20 years ago, when I taught a lithography class at AMD in Austin.  Shortly after that I moved to Austin, and Steve and I become good friends.  He worked in litho at AMD\/Spansion for something over 20 years.  Steve and I wrote the first paper on \u201ctuning\u201d the lithography simulator PROLITH to match experimental data in 1996, an idea that eventually led to the development of the AutoTune product.  I still look at that paper as one of the best that I wrote.  Now, thanks to OPC, calibrating lithography simulators seems routine, but it was new and interesting stuff 15 years ago.  But mostly the time I spent with Steve was spent drinking beer, fishing and floating on lake Travis, arguing politics, and complaining about the semiconductor industry.  Usually doing all of these things simultaneously.<\/p>\n<p>Steve died yesterday after a year-long struggle with cancer.  He had not yet reached the age of 50.  His daughter Kelly is 9 years old, and his wife Phuong still works at Spansion.  I have trouble even trying to imagine what they are going through.  My heart goes out to them, and to all of Steve\u2019s family and friends that, like me, can\u2019t yet feel what it will be like to miss him.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/20100604-Thornton-lilbasscat2.jpg\" width=\"550\" height=\"540\" title=\"Steve Thornton and Kelly\" alt=\"Steve Thornton and Kelly\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I met Steve Thornton almost exactly 20 years ago, when I taught a lithography class at AMD in Austin. Shortly after that I moved to Austin, and Steve and I become good friends. He worked in litho at AMD\/Spansion for something over 20 years. Steve and I wrote the first paper on \u201ctuning\u201d the lithography [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181","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=181"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":353,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181\/revisions\/353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}