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1 month ago | 
photonics.com | Hank Hogan
Innovations in wavelength and pulse control allow LEDs to be more efficient in industrial settings, and developers say lighting should be considered at the start of system design. For potent implementation of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and light sources in machine vision applications, illumination needs must be integrated into the initial system design.
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1 month ago | 
spie.org | Hank Hogan
Unlike what happens in Las Vegas, what happens in a wafer fab doesn’t stay there. That’s why the use of PFAS (Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances) materials in semiconductor manufacturing is a concern. In lithography, PFAS plays crucial roles in the patterning of photoresist, and they present long term health and environmental hazards.
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1 month ago | 
spie.org | Hank Hogan
Most semiconductor lithography involves projecting a mask pattern onto a photoresist coated wafer, developing the exposed resist, and using that resist to transfer the pattern onto layers of insulators, conductors, and other circuit elements on the wafer. Repeating this process over and over eventually creates a complete integrated circuit like a microprocessor or memory.
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1 month ago | 
spie.org | Hank Hogan
Chips are headed up and down. So, lithography and related technologies will help that happen, according to presentations at the 2025 SPIE Advanced Lithography + Patterning conference.
Moore’s Law calls for a doubling of transistor counts within a packaged device every two years. For decades lithography and patterning enabled this scaling up in transistor density. Transistors got smaller in length, width, and height, allowing more of them to be packed into a given area.
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1 month ago | 
spie.org | Hank Hogan
AI in the form of ChatGPT and other large language models showed up in many of the presentations at the 2025 SPIE Advanced Lithography + Patterning conference. The demands of AI, for instance, on top of all the other markets for semiconductors will drive the overall semiconductor market to more than a trillion dollars by 2030, up from an estimated $642 billion in 2024. That growth results in a need for more chips.
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1 month ago | 
spie.org | Hank Hogan
Imagine technology development without Moore’s Law, where the doubling of device transistors every two years ceases. In this scenario, a smartphone bought five years from now would have no more processing power, memory storage, and connectivity speed than today’s models. Data centers a decade hence will balloon even more in size, because they will need many more servers to perform the computationally heavy tasks demanded by AI. Even cars, 20 years into the future, won’t be any smarter than today’s.
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1 month ago | 
spie.org | Hank Hogan
Like others at the 2025 Advanced Lithography + Patterning conference, Emily Gallagher, sustainability program director at imec, mentioned the exponential growth of AI demand, during a talk on Monday. Her focus was sustainability. During her presentation, she covered a particular consequence of that growing AI demand: the construction and operation of data centers.
“As we build these data centers, we are adding emissions,” she said.
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1 month ago | 
spie.org | Hank Hogan
In two plenary talks on Tuesday at the 2025 Advanced Lithography + Patterning conference, speakers from ASML and IBM explored the lithography challenges associated with AI and quantum computing. Overcoming those challenges would expand the computing toolbox, making it possible to do calculations and solve problems impossible to do with today’s technology.
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1 month ago | 
spie.org | Hank Hogan
At Monday talks that opened SPIE’s 2025 Advanced Lithography + Patterning conference, two speakers outlined challenges facing the semiconductor industry, like the need for greater energy efficiency or heat management. They also discussed potential solutions, including changes in transistor layout and materials. Success in dealing with the issues confronting the industry, they noted, could pave the way for transformative technologies, like humanoid robots.
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1 month ago | 
spie.org | Hank Hogan
Extreme ultraviolet lithography, or EUVL, is a hot topic at the 2025 SPIE Advanced Lithography + Patterning conference. EUVL technology continues to evolve, as evidenced by presentations on the progress of its numerical aperture (NA). Today’s EUVL tools have an NA of 0.33. Upcoming semiconductor technology nodes, though, will push those systems to their resolution limit and beyond. So, the industry is racing to deploy 0.55 high NA tools. On the drawing boards there are 0.75 hyper NA tools.
