SPIE Advanced Lithography Symposium 2017 – day 0

Sunday was a beautiful day in San Jose, bright and sunny.  Just a few blocks away, though, last week’s flooding has devastated whole neighborhoods, causing possibly billions of dollars in damage and the evacuation of more than 10,000 people.  Though very close, that disaster seems far away as we begin the SPIE Advanced Lithography Symposium and shift our focus from what nature can do to us to what we can do to harness nature.

Attendance is again at about 2,200 people this year, similar to what it has been for the last eight years.  It’s hard to get a full sense of what this week will teach us, but just a cursory glance at the program reveals same major shifts in emphasis in the lithography world.  The Advanced Lithography Technologies conference, now renamed Emerging Pattern Technologies, has shrunk considerably over the last two years, from 71 orals and 27 posters in 2015, to 27 orals and 14 posters this year.  There are far fewer papers on DSA (directed self-assembly) this year, as well as fewer multibeam e-beam lithography and nanoimprint lithography papers.  DSA’s early promise of “resolution in a bottle” has given way to the hard reality of defectivity for a thermodynamically driven system.  Meanwhile, the EUV community is emphasizing their progress towards manufacturing readiness.  Some hard realities await them as well, though, and talks on line-edge roughness seem to be everywhere.

This gives me the opportunity to advertise my first talk, at 5:40pm on Monday, at the end of the first day of the EUV conference.  I have been invited to give a 40 minute tutorial talk on stochastic-induced roughness.  I believe this is the first time that we’ve had a tutorial talk at the Advanced Lithography symposium, and I am very excited to be giving it.  I hope everyone interested in line-edge roughness will endure the late hour and come and listen.

For those who are interested in the talk but can’t be at the Symposium, I’m excited about SPIE’s new program to capture each presentation on video.  SPIE will be filming the slides and recording the audio for each talk.  For presenters who have given SPIE permission, these talks will then be posted on the SPIE Digital Library as a permanent record of the presentation.  So, if you do miss my tutorial talk, look for it to show up in a few weeks on the Digital Library.

Let the Symposium begin!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *