The conference remains strong, with about 2100 total attendees\n(nearly constant over the last 10 years). \nThe plenary session Monday morning began as always with awards. We recognized seven new SPIE fellows from our\ncommunity: Yasin Ekinci (Paul Scherrer\nInstitut), Jo Finders (ASML), Lynford Goddard (University of Illinois), Stephen\nHsu (ASML), Hakaru Mizogushi (Gigaphoton), David Ruzic (University of Illinois),\nand Martha Sanchez (IBM). Congratulations! The first annual Nick Cobb memorial\nscholarship was awarded to Haoyu Yang of Chinese University of Hong Kong. The scholarship (sponsored by Mentor\nGraphics) is quite significant ($10,000).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Zernike Award for Microlithography is an\nannual award and our community\u2019s highest honor. \nLast year it was not given as we chose instead to honor Nick Cob after\nhis untimely death. This year, to make\nup for that gap, two awards were given: \nObert Wood (Global Foundries) and Akiyoshi Suzuki (Gigaphoton). Congratulations \u2013 two highly deserving\nhonorees. (Full disclosure: I\u2019m on the award selection committee so I am\nnot an unbiased observer.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The current president of SPIE, Jim Oschmann,\nwas in attendance to give out SPIE\u2019s President\u2019s Award to Bill Arnold for his\noutstanding service to the society. So\nfar as I recall, this is the first time this award has been given to someone\nfrom the lithography community. Since\nBill was on the stage anyway, he was further commemorated on the occasion of\nhis impending retirement from ASML (which happens April 1, as I understand). I hope, however, that this will not be the\nlast time we see Bill in our community. \nTwo other notable retirements were also mentioned: Pat Wight (long-time SPIE staff representative\nto this symposium) and C. Grant Willson of the University of Texas at Austin\n(more on that later in the week).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We often have some very good plenary speakers\nat this symposium, but not always. But\nit rare to have three very good ones the same year, so we were quite fortunate this\nyear. Dario Gil, former lithographer and\nnow Director of IBM Research, gave a great overview of quantum computing and\nIBM\u2019s efforts in building one. I\nespecially like their open-access model to allow the public to write and run code\non their 5-qubit quantum computer. As\nexpected, he confirmed that error rates are the biggest limiter to scaling up quantum\ncomputations. I have to admit that I\nstill have a spooky feeling about quantum computing. I\u2019m not sure that I am wishing for its\nsuccess.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The next two plenary talks dived into the\ndetails of 3D NAND manufacturing. I\nlearned much from both (and enjoyed the tag-team presentation format from Lam Research\nand ASML). I liked learning about the\ntricks used to make the stair-step patterning practical, with 6 lithography\nsteps plus 42 resist trim steps combined to make 48 stair-step patterns. Cool. The level of vertical integration in 3D\nNAND is becoming quite staggering. Over\n100 layers of transistors! With scaling\nup continuing into the foreseeable future (possibly to 512 layers)! Wow. \nLots of patterning challenges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I went to the EUV session for the two keynote\ntalks, one by on old lithographer (Bernd Geh of Zeiss) and the other by a young\nlithographer (Ryoung-Han Kim of imec). \nActually, I don\u2019t think of Bernd as old (he is too close in age to me),\nbut that is how he described himself. As\nfor me, I was the grumpy old lithographer portrayed in a cartoon at the end of\nhis talk. I accept the characterization,\nthough I am grumpy only sometimes. The\nbest bit from Bernd\u2019s talk was his definition of \u201ck4\u201d, a scaling constant relating\nmeasured LCDU (local critical dimension uniformity) caused by stochastics to NILS\n(normalized image log-slope) and exposure dose. \nAlas, he exhibited the standard physicist bias: there is nothing we can do about photon shot\nnoise (since we understand that), but since we don\u2019t understand the ultimate\nstochastic limits within the resist, we just need a better resist. Ryoung-Han Kim provided my favorite quote of\nthe conference so far: \u201cWe used to say\nEUV would simplify OPC. Now we know that\nEUV complicates OPC.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I shifted to the Metrology session to hear Ofer\nAdan talk about AMAT\u2019s new SEM. Or\nactually I heard him not talk about AMAT\u2019s new SEM since he didn\u2019t really say\nanything about it. I gather that it is a\nhigher electron voltage tool that collects and combines signals from new\nbackscatter and secondary electron detectors. \nBut I\u2019m not sure. The goal was to\nsee multiple layers of the device at once in order to measure within-device overlay. Back at the EUV conference I heard the papers\nin the high-NA session. But since\nhigh-NA EUV lithography is many years away, it was mostly plans and\nsimulations. The exception was Chris Anderson\u2019s\ntalk on the newly operational MET-5, a microfield EUV lithography tool with NA\n= 0.5 built by Lawrence Berkeley National Labs. \nI\u2019m sure this will serve as a very valuable resist testing platform,\njust as the MET-3 did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I ended the conference day by giving a keynote\ntalk at the Novel Patterning conference. \nMy talk was entitled \u201cWill stochastics be the ultimate limiter for nanopatterning?\u201d If you missed the talk, I\u2019ll give the\nabridged version: Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The evening involved a customer dinner for my\nday job at Fractilia, followed by staying out too late and drinking too much\nbeer. The first of many similar nights\nthis week I am sure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The conference remains strong, with about 2100 total attendees (nearly constant over the last 10 years). The plenary session Monday morning began as always with awards. We recognized seven new SPIE fellows from our community: Yasin Ekinci (Paul Scherrer Institut), Jo Finders (ASML), Lynford Goddard (University of Illinois), Stephen Hsu (ASML), Hakaru Mizogushi (Gigaphoton), David […]<\/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-582","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-microlithography"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/582","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=582"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/582\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":583,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/582\/revisions\/583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}