July 17, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (3)

As expected, Moscone West was hopping this year more than I’ve ever seen it. As I mentioned in my last post about Intersolar, SEMI has made attempts in the past to get people to venture out of the North and South halls, but the beer gardens and oompah bands nonetheless left the packaging suppliers in the West feeling a bit unloved. This year was different. The solar pull was just too strong, and people were coming over in droves.

Perhaps no exhibitor epitomizes this shift better than our industry’s own dominant player, Applied Materials. It was hard to avoid the buzz they created at SEMICON West this year. Even sitting at the Lithography Brea...Read More

July 8, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (1)

Carl Zeiss SMT (Oberkochen, Germany) recently designated Schott Lithotec (Jena, Germany) as its latest Supply Chain Partner. The official press release talked about what the new status meant: “expanding our long-term relationship and business”, “we will jointly fine tune our technologies”, and strengthening the “historic business relation”. But, particularly with Schott Lithotec’s highly pivotal role in the viability of high-index immersion lithography, I was curious to know what the Partner designation really meant.

There ...Read More

July 8, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

SEMICON West, one of our busiest shows of the year, just keeps getting busier. We used to have five days to cover everything — Monday through Wednesday up in San Francisco covering the front end, heading down to San Jose Wednesday night to finish out the week in the back end. And those were the days before Semiconductor International took over the show daily, and before SEMI started up its TechXPOT programs. Now we have just three days to get and write all the news we can for the show’s printed Daily News, our own ongoing online news and daily NewsBreak newsletters — not to mention the usual bit of face time with the sources that help us out so much throughout the year.

(I know. You’ve taken out your violins,...Read More

July 1, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (1)

Molecular Imprints Inc. (Austin, Texas) put out a press release today announcing the appointment of Ben Eynon as the company’s vice president of marketing and business development for semiconductors. No wonder Sematech folks were being so cagey in May when I asked when Eynon would be taking over from Mike Lercel as lithography director. Eynon was supposed to be taking over in May, but Lercel was still holding the reins at the Litho Forum that month in Bolton Landing, N.Y. It turns out Lercel already knew then that Eynon was leaving, but couldn’t say anything before Molecular Imprints made its announcement. In fact, Eynon has already been at MII for about a month, he tells me.

The move was a nat...Read More

June 17, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (2)

In my June 11 Lithography Report, I asked readers for feedback on the International Workshop on EUV Lithography, a new conference organized by Vivek Bakshi and EUV Litho Inc., which took place last week in Maui. I got such a detailed and informative response from one reader that I wanted to share it with you here.

So this latest installment is a guest post from Kenneth Goldberg, a physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) who works on EUV lithography issues, primarily optics testing (EUV interferometry) and EUV actinic mask inspection (AIMS-type and scanning). He attended the conference, where he led a mask ins...Read More