While I can’t really call myself a big fan of Jay Leno, I confess to the occasional guilty pleasure of enjoying the "Jaywalking" segment in his "Tonight" show, when he would go out on the street and ask people he ran into questions like "Where was the Vietnam War fought?" Answer: "Korea?" Or "What is this a picture of?" (showing the zeppelin Hindenburg bursting into flames). Answer: "The sinking of the Titanic?" And one of my favorites, (showing a brand-new college graduate still in her robe and mortarboard a photo of President Lyndon Baines Johnson) "Who is this man? His initials are LBJ." Answer: "Jefferson?"

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I’ve just returned from Albany, New York, where I attended the 2009 International Conference on Frontiers of Characterization and Metrology for Nanoelectronics. I confess to having a soft spot in my heart for that event, because metrology is a field that has always fascinated me—overwhelmingly, there are so many things that we could not do and build if we weren’t able to measure them: from a picket fence board to the Space Shuttle.

Besides, not only is Semiconductor International the conference’s sponsoring publication, but I can also boast about being a member of the event’s committee. Some of the other alphabet-soup sponsors are CNSE NIST, ISMI, SEMI, IEEE, SRC, EDS, and NSF.

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Without doubt, metrology is becoming increasingly more important as the industry works its way down to the smaller nodes. Some of the main challenges lie in the lithography area. Right now, we’re essentially facing two options: 193-mm immersion lithography with double patterning, or EUV litho.

At the recent SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference held in San Jose, I spent some time with Dr. Kurt Ronse, IMEC’s lithography department director. He is responsible for the Advanced Lithography Program, which covers 193-nm immersion, double patterning, and EUV lithography. During our conversation he mentioned that, whichever technology decision the industry makes, metrology will be an increasingly important tool to achieve it. Rons...Read More

Regardless of what you might think about the idea of a stimulus package to get moving the currently disastrous U.S. economy, seen from a purely mathematical perspective a million (much less a trillion!) of anything is a rather difficult concept for the human mind to grasp—the magnitude is meaningless.

One of my most favorite people, Sherlock Holmes, once complained to his friend and biographer, Dr. John H. Watson, "Data! Data! Data! I can make no bricks without clay!" It occurred to me that perhaps there was a way to break down the even more difficult concept of a trillion by framing it into somewhat more understandable data "bricks."

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