{"id":535,"date":"2017-06-20T16:47:54","date_gmt":"2017-06-20T21:47:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/life.lithoguru.com\/?p=535"},"modified":"2017-06-20T16:47:54","modified_gmt":"2017-06-20T21:47:54","slug":"captive-in-orlando","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/?p=535","title":{"rendered":"Captive in Orlando"},"content":{"rendered":"

61st International Conference on Electron, Ion, and Photon Beam Technology and Nanofabrication<\/em>
\nOrlando, FL, May 30 \u2013 June 2, 2017<\/p>\n

Unlike some conferences, the 3-beams conference moves to a new location each year.\u00a0 This means that some years it is in a location I like better than other years. \u00a0Last year was Pittsburg (liked it), in the past it has been in Las Vegas (didn\u2019t like it), and this year it was in Orlando, Florida.\u00a0 I like Orlando, at least when I\u2019m with my family and we are going to Disney or Harry Potter World.\u00a0 But when your conference is at a resort (Disney\u2019s Coronado Springs, in this case) and you\u2019re not there with family, you become trapped.\u00a0 It was a 20 minute cab ride to any restaurant or bar that wasn\u2019t part of Disney.\u00a0 So I ended up eating mediocre resort food and paying $11 for a beer.\u00a0 The only redeeming factor was that the conference was good.<\/p>\n

Historically, the core of the triple beam conference has been lithography (using electrons, ions, photons, and non-beams) along with correlated disciplines (resist, etch, deposition, elf-assembly, etc.).\u00a0 The application of these fabrication techniques to make devices has always been important to the conference as well.\u00a0 It is not a manufacturing conference (one presenter described electron-beam lithography as a \u201chigh throughput\u201d option for nanopatterning), but that is what I like about it.\u00a0 It is quite academic, with many students giving papers (a plus for someone like me who spends more time at industry-focused conferences).\u00a0 Unfortunately, this year saw a larger than normal number of visa cancelations (students who couldn\u2019t get visas to travel here to present).<\/p>\n

One of my favorite papers of the conference was a plenary talk by D. Frank Ogletree of Lawrence Berkeley National Labs.\u00a0 As our industry barrels towards implementing UEV lithography in manufacturing, we still lack answers to very fundamental questions about the exposure mechanisms for EUV resists.\u00a0 Ogletree described one way to study the complicated interactions of a high-energy photon with a resist material by interacting those photons with model compounds in the gas phase.\u00a0 Simplifying the interactions allows for much more detailed measurements and easier interpretation of results.\u00a0 The surprising outcome was how high-energy EUV photons could cause massive fragmentation of the resist molecules.\u00a0 The full implications for resist chemistry are still unknown.<\/p>\n

Dr. Nishikawa of the University of Tokyo gave an interesting talk on directly exposing and cutting DSA (directed self-assembly) patterns using direct-write e-beam lithography.\u00a0 The results looked very promising.\u00a0 My favorite student paper was by Yao Luo of Texas A&M, who is working on my favorite topic \u2013 stochastic-induced line-edge roughness.\u00a0 In a technique that I have also successfully employed, she used a Monte Carlo simulator to create simulated scanning electron micrographs of simulated rough features with known statistical characteristics.\u00a0 She then examined the impact on SEM noise on the ability to properly measure feature roughness.\u00a0 Great work.<\/p>\n

The multi-beam maskwriter company IMS gave an update on their tool development.\u00a0 They are currently shipping a maskwriter tool with 262,144 programmable electron beams, each with 20-nm resolution capability.\u00a0 This enables the printing of a state-of-the-art photomask in about 10 hours, limited mostly by the data path (275 TB of data for one mask).\u00a0 This is great progress for mask making, but we all want to know, how much faster can this tool become?<\/p>\n

There were several interesting papers on DSA (from MIT and NIST, among others), but little progress on its application to the semiconductor industry.\u00a0 Carolien Boeckx of Imec discussed the healing properties of DSA for contact holes.\u00a0 Unfortunately, you still can\u2019t heal a missing contact.<\/p>\n

I gave the last paper of the last day of the conference.\u00a0 My thanks to the 25 hearty souls who persevered to the end and sat through my talk on how SEM errors influence line-edge roughness measurements.\u00a0 I then made a mad rush to the airport to catch the last plane to Austin.\u00a0 I needn\u2019t have rushed.\u00a0 Thanks to weather my flight was canceled and I found myself captive in Orlando for one more night.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

61st International Conference on Electron, Ion, and Photon Beam Technology and Nanofabrication Orlando, FL, May 30 \u2013 June 2, 2017 Unlike some conferences, the 3-beams conference moves to a new location each year.\u00a0 This means that some years it is in a location I like better than other years. \u00a0Last year was Pittsburg (liked it), […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-535","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-microlithography"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/535","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=535"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/535\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":536,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/535\/revisions\/536"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}