{"id":556,"date":"2018-02-27T09:02:41","date_gmt":"2018-02-27T15:02:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/life.lithoguru.com\/?p=556"},"modified":"2018-02-27T09:02:41","modified_gmt":"2018-02-27T15:02:41","slug":"spie-advanced-lithography-symposium-2018-day-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/?p=556","title":{"rendered":"SPIE Advanced Lithography Symposium 2018 \u2013 day 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

The plenary session Monday morning began with awards.\u00a0 We recognized four new SPIE fellows from our community:\u00a0 Jason Cain, Alexander Starikov, Peter Trefonas, and Reinhard Voekel.\u00a0 Congratulations!\u00a0 We had no presentation of the SPIE Frits Zernike Award for Microlithography this year, for a very sad reason.\u00a0 Just before the award committee was to vote on the winner, one of the nominees for the award, Nick Cobb, died.\u00a0 (I\u2019m on that committee.)\u00a0 So instead of making a Frits Zernike award this year, we decided to honor Nick with a special mention and the establishment of the Nick Cobb Memorial Scholarship (thanks to the generation contribution of Mentor Graphics and a matching contribution by SPIE).\u00a0 It was very touching to see Nick\u2019s family there for this special recognition.<\/span><\/p>\n

The three plenary talks were all interesting, and each as different from the other as they could be.\u00a0 Yan Borodovsky came out of retirement to discuss his views on the biggest challenges still facing EUV lithography as it nears high volume manufacturing (HVM).\u00a0 I liked this quote about EUV:\u00a0 \u201cIt\u2019s not about if, or even when, but how well?\u201d\u00a0 Yan focused on the quality problems of EUV in two major areas.\u00a0 First, the EUV mask is a complex phase shifting mask with unintended phase shifts.\u00a0 Controlling and managing these phase shifts is critical and difficult.\u00a0 Second, stochastic defects \u201cmust be eliminated for EUV HVM\u201d according to Yan.\u00a0 How to do this in the short term is unclear, but since these stochastic failures increase dramatically as feature size decreases, the long-term solution is even more problematic.\u00a0 Yan suggested that the only practical approach is to live with them by moving our logic computing devices to some type of fault-tolerant architecture, such a neuromorphic computing or fine-grained cores (thousands of small cores, so that if one or a few go bad you still have a valuable chip).\u00a0 I\u2019m not sure how long it will take to move away from the standard Von Neumann computing architecture, but it won\u2019t happen in the next few years, that is sure.<\/span><\/p>\n

Dan Hutcheson gave his typically upbeat assessment of the future of Moore\u2019s Law \u2013 somehow the community will overcome the technical hurdles because the economic incentives to do so as so compelling.\u00a0 But of course, this will not be true forever.\u00a0 Dan\u2019s opinion was that trying to predict when the end might come would be self-defeating by reducing one\u2019s motivation to forestall that end.\u00a0 I don\u2019t agree, but I understand his point.<\/span><\/p>\n

While Dan\u2019s talk gave a 40,000-foot view of the economics of lithography, Stephen Hsu\u2019s plenary talk dove into the gory details of OPC and RET (resolution enhancement technology) from ASML\u2019s perspective.\u00a0 The many innovative technologies developed by ASML to improve NILS (normalized image log-slope, a measure of aerial image quality) will result in reduction in stochastic problems, but it is clear that this will not be enough.\u00a0 Thus, Stephen reminded us that \u201cmore resist improvement is needed for EUV.\u201d\u00a0 To that I counter that more improvement in the EUV source is in fact what is needed, and no call to improve resists should be unaccompanied by a call to improve source power.<\/span><\/p>\n

George Gomba gave the first keynote address of the EUV conference and he made the same mistake as Stephen Hsu:\u00a0 admitting that EUV photon shot noise was a big problem and then calling on resist improvements as the required solution.\u00a0 In then end, however, he accurately described the three major unsolved problems in EUV as stochastic failures, mask defectivity, and meeting the source power roadmap going forward.<\/span><\/p>\n

Following George was the second keynote by Chris Ober of Cornell, talking about his group\u2019s approach to developing EUV resists.\u00a0 Unfortunately, in a parallel conference Geert Vandenberghe of imec was also giving a review of the status of EUV resists.\u00a0 The lack of coordination between parallel sessions in different conferences is a perennial complaint of mine.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the afternoon I attended the joint EUV and resist session.\u00a0 I have to admit a great thrill at seeing Fractilia\u2019s roughness measurement product, MetroLER, used so effectively in nearly all of the papers in that session.\u00a0 TEL and imec gave four of the five talks in the session, and both are users of MetroLER.\u00a0 Thus, my view of those papers is quite biased, unlike their measurements, which were quite unbiased.\u00a0 (Sorry, LER measurement nerd humor).\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The 6pm conference welcome reception was very nice \u2013 I liked it being held in an open area of the conventional hall floor rather than in a room, and I like the beer that was available.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0After many good conversations at several different hospitality suites, it was back to my room to prepare for my first talk, early the next morning.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The plenary session Monday morning began with awards.\u00a0 We recognized four new SPIE fellows from our community:\u00a0 Jason Cain, Alexander Starikov, Peter Trefonas, and Reinhard Voekel.\u00a0 Congratulations!\u00a0 We had no presentation of the SPIE Frits Zernike Award for Microlithography this year, for a very sad reason.\u00a0 Just before the award committee was to vote on […]<\/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-556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-microlithography"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556","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=556"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":557,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556\/revisions\/557"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}