Hank Hogan

Writer at Freelance

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Articles

Land-based sea urchin ranchers are kelp forest crusaders and sushi entrepreneurs

2 weeks ago | globalseafood.org | Hank Hogan

Oregon’s OoNee Sea Urchin Ranch is ramping up its land-based sea urchin farm using RAS technologyOften likened to cockroaches, zombies and sheep, sea urchin populations have gotten out of balance within ecosystems along the West Coast of the United States and some coastal areas of eastern Asia. As a result, the spiky critters can clear-cut a kelp forest, leaving hundreds of dormant sea urchins to litter the ocean floor, lying in wait to attack any regrowth.
LEDs Shine Brighter in Machine Vision Applications

Mar 25, 2025 | 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.
Getting PFAS out of lithography materials

Mar 4, 2025 | 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.
Other lithography approaches offer alternatives

Mar 4, 2025 | 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.
Chips - and lithography - head up and down

Mar 3, 2025 | 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.
AI’s impact: Three examples

Mar 3, 2025 | 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.
Photonics aids the march of Moore's Law

Mar 1, 2025 | 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.
Accounting for sustainability in lithography

Feb 26, 2025 | 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.
Lithography and AI and quantum computing

Feb 26, 2025 | 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.
Meeting semiconductor challenges with lithography

Feb 25, 2025 | 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.