For decades now, there has been a desperate wringing of hands and loud, roaring noises of sadness and despair over the fact that we are losing our technical infrastructure because companies are migrating to other countries, attracted by more genial business climates, mostly due to those nations’ lower labor costs and their governments’ economic breaks, offered to almost any company willing to move its means of production there.

There have been very strong complaints on our side, but very little has been done. Yes, Congress shows deep co...Read More

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During a conversation on some of the lithography and metrology technology problems that our industry faces as we continue racing after Moore’s and Wang’s Laws, my friend Alain Diebold, Empire Professor of Nanoscale Science at the ...Read More

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I had a long conversation with Vicky Hadfield, president of SEMI North America (San Jose, Calif.), and Bob Akins, chairman and CEO of Cymer (San Diego, Calif.). They walked me through what, without fear of exaggeration, is probably SEMI’s most important report of the decade, a white paper entitled,...Read More

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Mask inspection certainly has not been made any easier by the continuing complexity being designed into masks to enable them to print the desired features on the wafer. Low k₁ lithography, for example, requires aggressive OPCs, phase-shift masks, combined with extreme off-axis illumination. These and other factors have combined to create major inspection hurdles. Each generation of photomasks incorporates increasingly sophisticated resolution enhancement techniques that reduce the correlation between the pattern on the mask and that on the printed wafer. This can present a problem for traditional inspection systems because they can only produce an image of the mask itself, and it has been a while since there was a connec...Read More

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Author James Lipton spent the better part of two decades researching and accumulating “nouns of multitude,” which are used to describe the gathering of commonplace or exotic creatures, such as a litter of puppies, a pride of lions, or a knot of toads. His book, ...Read More

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