A Limerick

On Friday I was in New York for some expert witness consulting work. I had the pleasure of being deposed (my favorite thing to do, save having a root canal). Strangely enough, though, the good thing about this job is the lawyers.

IP lawyers, especially those that might be working on a case that would require the services of a lithographer, are not your normal breed of lawyers. Most of them started out as engineers or scientists. And even after decades of wearing suits and working in New York high-rises with views of the Statue of Liberty, it only takes a little encouragement for them to show you their true geeky nature. So on Friday, a high-powered lawyer in an expensive suit told me this Limerick from memory:

Concerning the nature of light,
It is hard to know which is right.
Is it particle or waves?
In both ways it behaves,
But we know it is absent at night.

How can you help but like a guy who has that poem at the tip of his tongue?

Jeff Stories #10

This story supplied by Yan Zheng, who work with Jeff at KLA-Tencor for about five years:

Four years ago, my husband and I had an argument after we bought our second house. I couldn’t remember what caused the argument, but only remember the result – Jerry was very angry and found no place to unload his anger, so he punched the wall and made a hole there. That made me even angrier. I told Jeff the next day, and when I said “How can I sell my house with a hole there?” Jeff told me “That’s a piece of cake to fix.” But then he asked me if Jerry had hurt his fist – because he said he did the same thing a long time ago and he was not as lucky as Jerry. His fist hit the stud instead of drywall. A day later, Jeff brought a piece of dry board and all the tools and stopped by our house. He showed Jerry how to fix it and finished job all by himself very quickly.

Jeff Stories #9

Jeff Byers’ latest project has been making cheese. Over the last few months he has made ricotta (already consumed), cheddar (tasted, but still improving with age) and parmesan (which needs another 6 months of aging before it will be ready). Jeff likes to do things with his hands, he likes to learn new things, and he likes to experiment. These traits are reflected in his hobbies. For example, his dewberry beer was great, his rosemary beer was “interesting”. And lest you think Carita is immune from these impulses, she has made many kinds of exotic soaps – giving them away to all of her friends until she ran out of friends (she gave me orange blossom – a manly scent).

Update on Jeff: his condition has improved enough to move him out of the ICU and into the intermediate care area of the hospital.

Jeff Stories #8

One of Jeff Byers’ friends just told me this story.

Anyone who knows Jeff knows that he is not enamored with the electronic leashes (pagers, cell phones, or the dreaded Blackberry) so common in corporate America. He was one of the last people I know (with the exception of my in-laws) to get a cell phone. But SEMATECH made him wear a pager. One day he was working intently in the fab when his pager went off. Judging (probably correctly) that what he was doing was more important than the page, he kept right on working. And the pager kept on paging. After the fourth page, Jeff slammed the offending device into the floor, breaking it to pieces. I hear they are still finding little pager bits in the SEMATECH fab.

Progress report on Jeff: I hear that he is continuing to heal well, with a broken vertebrae being the item of biggest concern. The doctors say that Jeff could stay unconscious for a few more weeks without that length of time being out of the ordinary for his injuries. He seems to be getting excellent care, and so I am mostly just waiting and hoping.

A Letter to BACUS

Another year has gone by and I am again missing BACUS, the semiconductor industry’s premier conference on photomask technology being held this week in Monterey, California. Since there are so many friends in the business that I keep in touch with by attending conferences like BACUS, I decided to put together a “letter to BACUS” as a way of letting people know what I have been up to. Kind of like one of those boring Christmas letters that you get from your mother’s cousin that you can’t remember ever meeting. Only this letter is in the form of a song. I hope it won’t be too boring. The link below sends you to the page where the song can be found:

http://www.lithoguru.com/scientist/litho_lite/bacus2007.html

Jeff Stories #7

Jeff Byers got his PhD in quantum chemistry, but don’t let that fool you – to his core he is a down-to-earth, hands-on guy. He told me the story of the first time he rented a Bobcat – a small backhoe that he used to dig out his pond (or maybe it was the foundation to the bath house – I can’t remember which). Jeff always suspected that operating one of these “small” pieces of heavy machinery would be a lot of fun, but I guess it turned out better than even he expected. When he climbed down from the excavator his wife asked him what he thought. “It was better than sex,” was his reply. Understandably, Carita was skeptical. So she gave it a try herself. “Well?”, Jeff asked. She had to admit that Jeff was right.

I’ve never operated a Bobcat, so I’m speaking from ignorance here, but I found this whole episode just a bit strange. So the first chance I had, I told the story to a couple of construction-working friends who have had many opportunities to use backhoes. They said there was no doubt – Jeff is crazy. Not that I needed confirmation.

Jeff Stories #6

If you want to know a sure way to make Jeff Byers mad, this is it: announce that your company is having a layoff shortly after announcing record profit for the quarter. Or better yet, have his profit sharing check arrive in the mail just after watching a friend and coworker being escorted out of the building in his employer’s latest cost-cutting move. While these actions are very popular on Wall Street, they are sure to get you on Jeff’s “money-grubbing bastards” list of corporate CEOs. And please, don’t start reciting “shareholder value” excuses – Jeff will only get more angry when he hears your small-minded rationalizations of corporate greed.

Jeff worked for me for five years at KLA-Tencor, and it was a love-hate relationship for Jeff the whole time. I know he loved working with the other guys in his team – Mark Smith, Rob Jones, William Howard, Trey Graves, Sanjay Kapasi, John Biafore and others – and on the challenges of advanced lithography simulation. I loved it too – a fun problem and the very best people. But in the end, one too many record-profit layoffs weighed down Jeff’s conscience and he left.

I bring up this story more to talk about me than Jeff. The five plus years that I managed the FINLE R&D team at KLA-Tencor was a truly fantastic experience. And it was phenomenal for one reason – the great people I was fortunate enough to work with. I think Jeff Byers is absolutely the best at what he does in the world. To work with someone who is the best – not just really good, but actually the best – well, that is a rare experience. Those were five years that I will never forget.

Jeff Stories #5

Yesterday was Friday, and quite frequently for the crowd I hang out with the early evening on a Friday is spent at happy hour. Kim Dean is the current Master of Ceremonies for Austin’s irregular gathering of beer-loving lithographers, though John Petersen or I sometimes take charge and call a gathering together. We visit a number of venues, but our preference is for brewpubs and our favorite is the Draft House (formerly known as the Draft Horse, but that’s a different story), where we always drink in the parking lot. Jeff Byers, as a true lover of good beer, takes advantage of these assemblies as often as anyone, though he claims his reason is to avoid the Friday traffic home (which can easily become an hour’s drive for him).

Ten years ago, things were a bit different. The date was not irregular, and neither was the place: every Friday afternoon, and sometimes late into the evening, Austin’s best (or at least most social) lithographers could always be found at the Waterloo Brewing Company in the now ultra-popular warehouse district of downtown Austin. The O’Henry Porter was one of the best beers ever made (I’m getting a lump in my throat just thinking about it), and the burgers were the perfect complement to the beer. Alas, Waterloo, the first brewpub in Texas, closed in 2001 – a victim of rampant downtown development, and probably some bad business management on the part of the owner, Bill. But for nearly eight years a lot of interesting lithography ideas were discussed there, companies and technologies admired or panned there, and friendships forged there.

At least once a year I would meet Jeff at Waterloo for lunch to offer him a job. After about the fifth year in a row, we started scheduling the meeting as our annual Jeff job-offer lunch. I was quite happy and surprised when in 2000 he actually said yes!

No one called for a happy hour last night. We will soon, though, I’m sure, and when we do we will all be drinking to Jeff’s health.

Jeff Stories #4

The first time I got an email from Jeff Byers, it was signed “jefe”. I thought is was an all-too-common fat-fingered mistake in a quickly typed message. When the second email I got from him was signed in the same way, I began to wonder. It turns out that Jeff likes to use his nickname, “el jefe”, Spanish for “the boss”. I find this nickname absolutely hilarious. As far as I know, Jeff has never been the boss of anyone, and probably never will be. In the five years that he worked for me I frequently encouraged him to take on more leadership roles, but he steadfastly rejected any assignment that even remotely resembled “management” (a word that always brought fear and dread to Jeff’s face). Jeff is the ultimate “team player”, often taking less credit than he deserves and the first to share credit with others. Telling people what to do is totally anathema to Jeff’s personality (though telling some people where to go, interestingly, is not). Which is why “el jefe” is just perfect for Jeff.

Jeff Stories #3

I believe the year was 1995, and I was working on my first paper with Jeff Byers, then at SEMATECH. We were presenting at the SPIE Microlithography Symposium, the big event of the year for us lithographers, and Jeff and John Petersen were teaching me about reaction-diffusion and chemically amplified resists, while I was building their models into my software package, PROLITH. Back in those days of youthful exuberance, all three of us had the bad habit of finishing our papers at the last minute – which usually made for some very late nights in the hotel room at the conference. This year was no exception. I made my way to John’s room – where I knew that he and Jeff were trying to finish up the paper the night before the presentation – to see what I could do to help.

As I walked into the room, I noticed the place was littered with laptops, each running massive PROLITH simulations to try to get enough data for the paper. My eyes began to widen as the businessman in me took over from the scientist: SEMATECH had bought two copies of PROLITH, but John and Jeff were running a half dozen “illegal” copies in order to get the job done in time. But before I could open my mouth, John snapped “Shut up and give me your laptop!” What else could I do? After all, I was on the paper too.

We finished the paper in the nick of time, and it turned out pretty good, in my humble opinion. It was the first of many times when Jeff taught me about what really goes on inside of a photoresist. But when I got back to Austin, I made sure that the next version of PROLITH had copy-protection licensing software and a hardware dongle. Jeff and John and all the other last-minute lithographers have complained to me about it ever since, but I say, don’t blame me for trying to make an honest living – it’s John and Jeff’s fault!

Musings of a Gentleman Scientist