Aaron Hand

Twice the Immersion Fun
January 17, 2008

I have been woefully negligent about keeping up with this blog, and for that I apologize. I hereby pledge to do my darndest to stay on top of the goings on in the lithography world — not only by formulating blog postings in my head, but by actually typing them out as well.

One of the things that’s been keeping me so busy lately is the behind-the-scenes work on our next lithography webcast, which will examine what kind of shape immersion lithography is in, and what’s needed for the final push to high-volume production. Over the past couple months, we’ve managed to pull together a really great lineup of panelists: Burn Lin of TSMC, Kurt Ronse of IMEC, Bryan Rice of Sematech, and Soichi Inoue of Toshiba Semiconductor.

One of the things making this webcast more of a chore than our past webcasts — but also much more exciting — is the fact that we’ll be broadcasting it in both English and Japanese. While we’ve been doing webcasts for years in English, and our editorial staff in Japan has been doing live seminars for their Japanese audience, this is the first time we’ve come together to produce a panel discussion like this in both languages, for both of our respective audiences.

You might have already seen the promotions for the webcast, mentioning that the webcast will be presented in both languages (quite a few of you have signed up already). So I thought I’d give you a little behind-the-scenes peek at how we’re actually doing that. Beginning Feb. 19, to access the webcast, you will click on the link for whichever version you signed up for — either English or Japanese. If you go to the English version, you will hear Yours Truly introducing our speakers. If you go to the Japanese version, you will hear Jun Takahashi, editor-in-chief of Semiconductor International Japan, introducing the speakers. You will then hear presentations from all five of our panelists in your chosen language.

In actuality, Lin, Ronse and Rice will be presenting the latest from their respective organizations in English. Inoue will be presenting his results in his native Japanese. Before we go live, we will translate the first three into Japanese, and the other into English — to give us two full webcasts in both languages.

Sound like fun? Come join us, and see how it all turns out. Okay, I’ll admit that I’m a little nervous about the whole thing. This is relatively new ground for us. But once we pull this off, expect to see more of this in the future — in a range of languages. We actually are having a lot of fun as we come up with new ways to reach everybody with the wealth of information that’s available out there.

Posted by Aaron Hand on January 17, 2008 | Comments (0)