Tomorrow begins the biggest event of the year for those of us with the arcane title of lithographer. In particular, \u201csemiconductor lithographer\u201d, since we don\u2019t deal in art prints but rather work with $20M cameras that print features a few tens of nanometers wide. (But don\u2019t confuse us with those nanotechnology types \u2013 we make products not research proposals). It\u2019s the start of the week-long Microlithography Symposium, six separate conferences (five of them in parallel on Thursday!) with well over 150 papers a day and several thousand attendees.
\nThis is the 22nd time I\u2019ve been to this conference (don\u2019t say it, I already know how old I am), and it wasn\u2019t always like this. When I first came here in 1985 there were three separate conferences (and no parallel sessions \u2013 that headache didn\u2019t start until the next year), each with about 30 \u2013 40 papers. The number of attendees was a few hundred, not thousands, and we comfortably listened to papers predicting the inevitability of submicron manufacturing in the tiny Santa Clara Marriott. The first SPIE lithography conference (before my time, thank you very much) was exactly 30 years ago and had a total of 26 papers. Lithography was so much simpler then.
\nGrowth of this conference has paralleled growth in the semiconductor industry. As we outgrew the Marriott (I remember breaks where it took 15 minutes just to push through the crowd to get to a bathroom), the conference moved to downtown San Jose and the Fairmont hotel. This became a favorite location with many after-hours spots within walking distance. I\u2019m sure the locals were quite dismayed when whole sessions of geeky lithographers continued their technical discussions at the Gordon Biersch Microbrewery each night (Imagine the scene: \u201cX-ray will never work, I tell you!\u201d \u201cWhat do you know – you\u2019ve spent your entire career sniffing photoresist solvent.\u201d \u201cOh yea, well at least I\u2019ve actually made a chip that works!\u201d). But we eventually outgrew this comfortable home as well and moved to the Santa Clara Convention Center. While the bar at the Westin hotel was a favorite, it just wasn\u2019t the same. You couldn\u2019t walk anywhere and there just weren\u2019t enough restaurants for the growing crowds of hungry lithographers. Last year we moved back to San Jose and its bigger downtown convention center.
\nAnd so we begin. In the morning we start with the keynote speakers, and a massive week-long effort to cram as much information into our tiny little heads as we can possibly hold, hoping they won\u2019t explode by Friday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Tomorrow begins the biggest event of the year for those of us with the arcane title of lithographer. In particular, \u201csemiconductor lithographer\u201d, since we don\u2019t deal in art prints but rather work with $20M cameras that print features a few tens of nanometers wide. (But don\u2019t confuse us with those nanotechnology types \u2013 we make […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-microlithography"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8","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=8"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}