The SPIE Microlithography Symposium is without question the premier annual conference in the field of semiconductor microlithography. But all is not well in litho conference land. Many of the papers are simply not worth listening to. Of course, with any event this big you have to expect a range of quality in technical papers – to get the good one must accept the bad and the ugly. As the conference has grown over the years, the very good papers have stayed very good. But the bad papers have gotten worse, and the average quality of papers at the conference has steadily declined as the conference has grown. The reason for this is clear to me: an increased influence of sales and marketing goals over technical goals. With the conference’s growth in size has come a growth in influence, and a desire by many to control that influence.
What can be done to fix this problem? I’ve written a short whitepaper, A Modest Proposal, with concrete recommendations that I believe can improve paper quality. If you disagree, please let me know. If you agree, please let the conference organizers know.
Overall it sounds correct to me. I hope presenters don’t take the "be able to replicate" idea too far and do inappropriate things like take screen shots of the inputs of a software program and show exactly which buttons to push, in order that others can replicate the work, as that kind of information is considered confidential. It is confidential because it allows the competitors to see exactly how the software operates. It would be no less inappropriate for a presenter to give away a confidential detail about the formulation of a resist, for example.
Your observation and complaint are certainly on the mark. But I think SPIE has always been "half tradeshow, half technical conference". In the photolithography literature writing is more common than reading and a quality paper is rare. What we lack in academic rigor though we make up for in "high stakes innovation" – hence the posturing. So SPIE will continue down this road. My guess is that even the major truly academic gatherings (APS, ACS, IEEE, etc) are much more commercial now than 20 yrs. ago.