October 18, 2007 – At its annual award banquet, SEMI has named winners of two awards: one for achievements in the North American industry, and the other for a lifetime of technical innovation.
C. Grant Willson, Prof. at the U. of Texas/Austin’s College of Natural Sciences, is the recipient of the 2007 SEMI North America award, honoring his work as coinventor of the chemically activated resists starting at IBM in the late 1970s. He was “instrumental” in developing resists that relied on chemical amplification to increase sensitivity by a factor of 100 while maintaining required high resolutions, and offering very high contrast. (Editor’s Note: An article from C. Grant Willson, about step-and-flash imprint lithography for patterning interconnect dielectrics, appeared as the featured cover story in SST’s Sept. 2007 issue.)
SEMI’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the group’s highest honor, goes to Bernie Meyerson who led IBM’s development of silicon, germanium, and other technologies in the 1980s, then other development organizations within IBM for communications and semiconductors. He was appointed as an IBM Fellow in 1992, became CTO of IBM’s Technology Group in 2001, became head of IBM’s Semiconductor Research and Development Center in 2003, and appointed VP of strategic alliances and CTO of IBM’s System and Technology Group in 2005.
(Editor’s Note: Meyerson was a keynote speaker at The ConFab in 2006, proclaiming that semiconductor industry needs to usher in a new era of “collaborative innovation” to push beyond the limits of classical scaling.)