I have a confession to make.\u00a0 Sometimes I choose to go to a conference mostly based on its location.\u00a0 My core conference is SPIE\u2019s Advanced Lithography, and I would go to that wherever it was (San Jose is nice, but it is not a \u201cdestination\u201d).\u00a0 But there are a number of conferences at the periphery of lithography, and in particular conferences that touch on lithography for the academic community.\u00a0 Three conferences that fit this bill are the Electron, Ion, and Photon Beam Technology and Nanofabrication conference (EIPBN, often called 3-beams or triple beam) in the US, Microprocesses and Nanotechnology Conference (MNC) in Asia, and Micro and Nano Engineering (MNE) in Europe (thought of as sister conferences).\u00a0 They can be interesting, informative, thought provoking, and even inspiring.\u00a0 But often there is little of direct relevance to my current focus.\u00a0 In other words, I don\u2019t need to go, but sometimes I want to go.\u00a0 How much I want to go depends on where it is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This year, the MNE conference was on the island of Rhodes,\nGreece, and guess what? I wanted to go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These three conferences, EIPBN, MNC, and MNE, used to have a\nlot more lithography content, much of which was relevant to semiconductor lithography. Today, however, semiconductor lithography has\npriced itself out of the academic market, and universities employee either\nvastly outdated lithographies, or high-resolution approaches that are so slow\nthey could never be considered for the semiconductor industry. Still, it is always nice to find out what the\nacademic research community is up to in the world of lithography.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But frankly, for me, it is generally not worth traveling\nhalf-way around to world to go to one of these conferences. Unless I want to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And so I found myself this week in Rhodes, Greece, listening\nto interesting papers, presenting one myself, and enjoying the amazing beauty\nand heritage of the one of the Greek islands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The MNE conference is extremely vibrant, with a lot packed into three days:\u00a0 150 orals, 360 posters, and four evenings of social activities.\u00a0 Student participation is huge (often the point of an academic conference), and as an old, cynical industry guy, it is refreshing to be around enthusiastic young people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The plenary session started with an old friend \u2013 Yan Borodovsky,\nretired from Intel, who talked about Moore\u2019s Law: Past, Present, and\nFuture. As he told me after, \u201cI can\u2019t\nbelieve I am still being asked to speak when in my 5th<\/sup> year of\nretirement!\u201d For a retired guy, he gave\na great talk. His \u201cpast\u201d described the\nthree pillars of microelectronics: Von\nNeumann\u2019s computer architecture of CPU, memory, and I\/O, Moore\u2019s Law of reducing\ntransistor costs, and Dennard scaling that makes a transistor better when it is\nsmaller. One by one these pillars of\nmicroelectronics are falling away. \nDennard scaling ended in the mid-2000s when voltage scaling became\nincreasingly difficult. Smaller\ntransistors are no longer better, we just hope they are not terribly\nworse. Moore\u2019s Law has dramatically\nslowed of late, and Yan made a bold prediction \u2013 the end of reduced cost per\ntransistor would occur in 2021, coinciding with the attempt to bring EUV\nlithography into high volume (really high volume) manufacturing. The last pillar, Von Neumann\u2019s architecture,\nis the hardest to escape given its phenomenal success. But current high-performance computing is\nlimited both by the speed and power consumption associated with transferring data\nback and forth from memory to CPU. New\narchitectures, such as neuromorphic computing, could redefine these limits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yan\u2019s main point was that lithography choices have always been based on the constraints of these three pillars.\u00a0 He added one further important constraint:\u00a0 that today\u2019s logic chips (such as CPUs, GPUs, and Application Processors) are seriously defect intolerant.\u00a0 One defect (for example, one missing contact hole) will kill an entire chip.\u00a0 This reality rules out any lithography approach with defect densities greater than about 0.1 defect\/cm^2.\u00a0 That\u2019s a shame, since lithographies such as directed self-assembly (DSA) and nanoimprint lithography (NIL) are high resolution and cheap, but don\u2019t have the defect densities required for today\u2019s logic devices.\u00a0 A change to a computing architecture that is fundamentally defect tolerant would enable lower-cost lithography choices.\u00a0 Since today\u2019s chips have 50% or more of their cost coming from lithography, the impact would be huge.\u00a0 It was clear that Yan is hoping for a defect-tolerant future, so that lower-cost lithography approaches become practical.\u00a0 As am I.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There were only a few other talks specifically relevant to\nsemiconductor folks like me. B.T. Chan\nof imec talked about the etch challenges that come with making FinFETs with\nonly one or two fins. Michal Danek of\nLam Research talked about atomic layer deposition and atomic layer etching as\nenablers to 3D NAND devices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The social interactions of the conference were some of the highlights for me.\u00a0 The reception Monday night before the start of the conference brought us to crusader-era architecture (the Knights of Saint John ruled the island from about 1300 to about 1500) in the old town of Rodos (Rhodes).\u00a0 It was lovely, and included Homeric singing (what a treat).\u00a0 Tuesday night was a beach party (we could see Turkey from the beach).\u00a0 Wednesday night was the conference reception, and I had the honor of serving as a judge for the very popular Micrograph contest.\u00a0 John Randall began the micrograph competition at the 3-beams conference in 1995, and he brought it to MNE in 2005.\u00a0 This year there were over 60 entries, and the judging was hard.\u00a0 You can find this year\u2019s micrographs at https:\/\/www.zyvexlabs.com\/contests\/2019-3\/<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The conference ended Thursday night with a bus trip to\nLindos, an ancient and beautiful city. A\nfitting end to a conference defined, for me, by its location.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have a confession to make.\u00a0 Sometimes I choose to go to a conference mostly based on its location.\u00a0 My core conference is SPIE\u2019s Advanced Lithography, and I would go to that wherever it was (San Jose is nice, but it is not a \u201cdestination\u201d).\u00a0 But there are a number of conferences at the periphery […]<\/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-607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-microlithography"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/607","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=607"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/607\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":608,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/607\/revisions\/608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}