Industry

Eight new SPIE Fellows and winners of several important awards were announced at the 33rd annual SPIE Advanced Lithography (San Jose, CA) symposium.

Martin van den Brink of ASML Netherlands received the 2008 Frits Zernike Award in recognition of his pioneering contributions to the advancement of optical lithographic exposure tools. SPIE confers the Frits Zernike Award annually to honor outstanding accomplishments in microlithography, especially those furthering the development of semiconductor lithographic imaging solutions. The award is sponsored by Cymer and ASML.

The eight new Fellows named are among a total of 72 new SPIE Fellows promoted this year and being announced in presentations at various SPIE events. The new promotions bring the total number of SPIE Fellows from the Advanced Lithography community to 29, and include Christopher P. Ausschnitt, IBM Microelectronics Division; Peter De Groot, Zygo Corporation; Elizabeth Dobisz, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies; Mircea Dusa, ASML U.S. Inc.; Winfried Kaiser, Carl Zeiss SMT AG; Shinji Okazaki, Hitachi Ltd.; Richard Silver, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST); and David Williamson, Nikon Research Corporation of America.

The 2007 C. Grant Willson Best Paper Award was presented to a team of authors from IBM Almaden Research Center and IBM Semiconductor Research and Development Center for a paper on "Fluoro-alcohol materials with tailored interfacial properties for immersion lithography."

Authors Matthew Sendelbach and Javier Ayala, IBM Microelectronics Division, and Pedro Herrera, KLA Tencor, were awarded the 2007 Metrology, Inspection, and Process Control Best Paper Award.

The 2008 Symposium Chair, Roxann Engelstad of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, was given a Certificate of Appreciation for her years of leadership of the symposium.

Research

Scientists at Lund University (Lund, Sweden) have filmed an electron in motion, the first time this has ever been achieved, allowing researchers to study the movements of the particle directly.

The scientists devised a method of filming by using short attosecond pulses of laser light, while another laser guided the motion of the electron to a collision with an atom that was captured on film.

The team, led by Dr. Johan Mauritsson, states that the technique also could be used to study what happens in an atom when an electron leaves its shell.