COSI 2011 - part 3 (final)

Hey everyone.. 

Today was the last day. A lot more relaxed. I got to hang out with some friends and do some fun stuff.  

Sunny and blue!

Wish I had taken more pictures of us! Next time..

There is so much in terms of talks I haven’t written about. I’m going to mention just a few things next.

This year’s meeting included quite a few talks on areas related to Lithography. I liked that because I don’t often go to conferences that are focused only on lithography. But it’s an interesting area and very relevant to anybody interested in imaging. So it was good to find some talks on this topic here.

Mehdi Vaez Iravani from KLA Tencor spoke about metrology in the semiconductor industry – mainly inspection of patterned and unpatterned wafers and related issues. There was also a very nice talk on model based metrology for resist patterns by Arie Boef from ASML. I also got to meet Dr. Alan Rosenbluth from IBM, T. J. Watson Research Center. His work on identifying a correction factor for source radiance in photolithography is an example of how much depends on “little” details in lithography. Clearly speed and accuracy are so very important in this industry.

Kenny Kubala from Five Focal gave an interesting talk on improving yield in wafer level cameras. He talked about measuring errors in manufacturing. They have their own fast, model-based algorithm for measuring post-assembly errors such as decenter and air-gaps. 

There was a very interesting talk on superresolution due to spatial non-linearity effects in non-linear material by Christopher Barsi from Princeton. He showed increased resolution and wider FOV.

There was also an interesting talk from Marc Christensen’s group on using structured illumination for optical superresolution using active illumination in cameras. Manju, the speaker at COSI, told us they are starting off a company called SLIC Technology which is trying to productize this work. And hey, startups for superresolution are always cool in my book! 

There is much I may have skipped here. These conference posts are written in some haste. Hopefully no one will mind typos and misspelled names. And then there was so much good stuff that I just couldn’t attend because of parallel sessions that I needed to be in. There was lots of Fourier Transform Spectroscopy, Wavefront Sensing, Adaptive Optics, 3D imaging, localization imaging.. it goes on. I attended some, but lots, I missed! I am hoping my colleagues caught it and will give me an update. 

The best part of conferences is always people! I am really glad I got to catch up with old friends again, meet new folks! The enthusiasm and excitement everyone has for their work is always infectious. And at conferences we get it all in one concentrated dose! :)

Now it’s time to go home. Am at the gate now and super-happy that Toronto airport has free WiFi!! :)

Cheers and thanks for reading!