SPIE – Day 1


The SPIE Advanced Lithography Symposium always begins on Monday, unless you take (or teach) a short course the day before. Only 12 courses are being taught this year, a low not seen this millennium and indicative of austere times. Still, short course attendance was up a tiny bit, and my course was full, and as always was fun to teach. I had two young engineers from Egypt in my class, and whe... » read more

SPIE – Day 2


I spent much of Tuesday learning about alternate lithography schemes. Toshiba gave an update on their efforts to evaluate nanoimprint lithography for chip manufacturing. The technology is closer to prime-time than I expected. Most of the data for 28 nm half-pitch looked very, very good (CDU of 1.2nm, LWR of 2nm, mix-and-match overlay of 10nm), but of course there is one big problem remaining... » read more

Advanced Lithography 2011 – A Prologue


In the long view, one thing is clear: the remarkable success of optical lithography at propelling Moore’s Law forward has been a long, steady ride. Moore’s Law has been lithography-limited since the early 1970s, so the steady progress in Moore’s Law over the last 40 years mirrors the steady improvement in resolution that optical lithography has been able to deliver in manufacturing. ... » read more

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