Have You Hugged an Engineer This Week?

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.