Obert R. Wood II and Akiyoshi Suzuki have been recognized by SPIE for outstanding accomplishments in microlithographic technology, especially in furthering the development of semiconductor lithographic imaging solutions. They each received this year’s Frits Zernike Award. This year, the award has dual recipients with Wood being recognized for his pioneering contributions to extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, and Suzuki being honored in recognition of his multiple innovations with lithography exposure tools. Wood is a principal member of the technical staff in the strategic lithography technology department at GLOBALFOUNDRIES. He was on the technical staff at Bell Laboratories for 34 years, and has extensive experience in EUV lithography, ultrahigh-intensity lasers, and laser surgery. Part of Wood’s pioneering work stems from the late 1980s when he built one of the first lithography systems using multilayer coated EUV mirrors, which led to the first high-quality images of sub-100-nm features in resist. This positioned EUVL (aka soft x-ray lithography at the time) as a top contender to succeed optical lithography. During the 1990s and the early 2000s, Wood expanded his research by publishing papers on multilayer mirrors, optical designs, optical testing, optics lifetime, aberrations and focus testing, sources, resists, masks, and metrology. As fully integrated systems were becoming available during the late 2000s, Wood proved that EUV lithography could be successfully integrated into normal semiconductor processing to produce working SRAM devices. This was an advance toward the acceptance of EUV as the main technology to follow immersion lithography. SPIE Fellow Akiyoshi Suzuki award recognizes his innovations with lithography exposure tools, including proximity printing, projection steppers, projection scanners, 1X and reduction types, reflective and refractive types, g-line, I-line, 248 nm, 193 nm, and 13.5 nm. Over Suzuki’s 40-year career at Canon, his contributions in microlithography, starting from contact to early projection systems, were pivotal. His early work on two-mirror wafer lithography systems, along with subsequent two-mirror designs for flat-panel display lithography, made an impressive impact on both the semiconductor and display industries. In 2014, Suzuki joined Gigaphoton as a technical adviser.
UV LEDs