Aaron Hand

Have You Hugged an Engineer This Week?
February 21, 2008

The American National Society of Professional Engineers has officially designated this week Engineers Week. I, for one, don’t want to miss this opportunity to give a big virtual hug (I’ll even throw in a virtual smooch) to all the outstanding lithography engineers working so hard to keep us on Moore’s Law.

How many times have we all heard about the imminent demise of optical lithography? If not for the very smart tricks developed by very smart engineers, it would’ve been dead long ago. And yet it’s as alive as ever. The engineering issues are getting tougher and tougher, and it’s an incredible amount of work that continues to go into developing such creative solutions in illumination, OPC, phase shifting, metrology, laser development, double patterning, high-index materials, and the list goes on and on. I don’t mean to slight all the brilliant chemists and mathematicians that play roles in all of this, but… well, it’s just not your week.

As the industry prepares to eventually usher out the role of optical lithography at the most critical layers (maybe), the heirs apparent bring their own engineering challenges, of course. I can’t tell you how many times questions during press conferences about the challenges surrounding extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography have been answered with a simple (and decidedly final), “That’s just an engineering problem.” The point there, of course, is that the technology in question is not a “showstopper” (technically). But it makes light of the fact that an incredible amount of engineering work is necessary for the solution in question.

There has been an awful lot of progress and success in EUV development, and we hear about more achievements all the time. There’s still a long way to go. But if we, as an industry, don’t eventually make it as far as we had hoped, it will definitely not be because the engineers were lazy or incompetent.

I tell people all the time that I’m just happy to be watching from the sidelines. Whatever happens, I’ll still be able to write about it. But I have an incredible amount of respect for all the engineers involved in the research and development — all the creativity and sweat that goes into the stuff that I get to write about every day.

There have been all sorts of activities surrounding Engineers Week, including efforts to get our young ones on an engineering track. Check it all out at the Engineers Week website. But in the meantime, stop for a moment, turn to the engineer next to you, and give him or her a big hug — or a high five, if you’d be more comfortable with that.

Posted by Aaron Hand on February 21, 2008 | Comments (1)