I rushed into the plenaries this morning at 2 minutes to 8, sure that I’d be stuck standing with my notepad until my eyes could adjust and I could squeeze into an open seat. Instead, I found perhaps 40 of the hundreds of chairs occupied, with some others milling about, getting caught up after months of restricted travel. I was able to take my pick of seats and, when I chose a seat on the aisle, I never once had to scoot aside to let somebody else into the row.

I don’t yet know what the attendance figures are for Advanced Lithography this year — those will likely come at the end of the week. But it’s safe to say that this is not a banner attendance year. The typical big names are here — I see plenty standing around chatting, including Will Conley, Lisa Su, Chris Progler, Luigi Capodieci, Brian Grenon, Donis Flagello, Bernie Meyerson, Harry Levinson, Lars Liebmann and several more of the usual suspects. But the typically capacity-filled rooms are anything but.

In his introduction, Progler, this year’s symposium chair, mentions that, despite the obviously lower attendance of the event this year, paper submissions have continued unabated, and the conference goes on with its “long tradition of very few paper cancellations,” Progler says. “So we do thank very much the authors for, I guess, fighting with your employers to come out here this year.”

You may be pretty tired of the doom and gloom of this abysmal economy we have all found ourselves in, but bear with me one more time. When I’m through here, I promise to spend the rest of the week talking about the technology. But the atmosphere here this year is unmistakable. People seem to be unable to avoid the topic of the bad economy — the effect it’s had on their companies, their friends, the work they’re doing, and this conference.

Last night at Nikon’s reception after an afternoon of LithoVision presentations, so many of the conversations I overheard and participated in focused on the state of the economy and what it will likely mean for our industry. Of course, nobody really knows exactly what it will mean ultimately because if there’s one thing they know it’s that they have no visibility at this point. And this morning, at Advanced Lithography, the three plenary speakers couldn’t help but make mention of the current state of affairs.

Starting his talk about extending Moore’s Law into flat panel display and photovoltaics industries on a comforting note, Gilad Almogy echoed his boss Mike Splinter’s words when he said 2009 is “probably going to be the worst year ever for our industry.” And he then proceeded to show the overshadowing of Moore’s Law by the much older Law of Supply and Demand. “The fact that you’re driving down prices doesn’t mean that the industry is going to grow at all,” he explained.

But the point that Almogy, senior vice president and general manager for Applied Materials’ Display and Thin Film Solar Products Business Group, was making, I believe, was not a repeated message of doom and gloom, but rather a reminder of the exponential growth that the semiconductor industry has been able to achieve year after year (well, not this year). Although not based on transistors or functions per chip but rather size and efficiency, respectively, the FPD and solar industries face a Moore’s Law-type mechanism that will see them growing at an even faster rate.

This is a time for innovation — even if you’re not sure how you’re going to get all the work done since your co-workers were recently laid off. During her discussion of the “embedded intelligence revolution,” Lisa Su, senior vice president, CTO and general manager of the Networking and Multimedia Group at Freescale Semiconductor, urged the audience to look past the depressing quarterly reports. “There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on in the industry,” she said, “and there’s a lot of room for innovation.”

When Bernie Meyerson, vice president for strategic alliances and CTO of the IBM Systems and Technology Group, gave his plenary on converging technology and business models, he urged people to “have the gumption” to continue to innovate in the face of this economy. “Just because the economy dies doesn’t mean you have to stop innovating,” he said, adding later, “Please remember that if you stop innovating, when this turns — and it will turn — the folks that stop innovating won’t be with us anymore.”

The fact is that the industry is facing a lot of really tough technical challenges, including having not nearly enough of a clue about what lithography technique will be viable beyond 20 nm. And now companies are facing those challenges under great economic stress. There are questions about who will pay for some of the development work that needs to be done, now more than ever. But the survivors will continue to make things happen.