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Image by IBM ResearchDow Corning and IBM scientists unveiled a major step in photonics yesterday at the Photonics West conference, using a new type of polymer material to transmit light instead of electrical signals within supercomputers and data centers. This new silicone-based material offers better physical properties, including robustness and flexibility, making it ideal for applications in Big Data and for the development of future exascale computers, which are capable of performing a billion billion computations per second.

With exabytes of structured and unstructured data growing annually at 60 percent, scientists have been researching a range of technological advancements to drastically reduce the energy required to move all that data from the processor to the printed circuit board within a computer. Optical interconnect technology offers bandwidth and power efficiency advantages compared to established electrical signaling.

“Polymer waveguides provide an integrated means to route optical signals similar to how copper lines route electrical signals,” said Dr. Bert Jan Offrein, manager of the Photonics Research Group at IBM Research. “Our design is highly flexible, resistant to high temperatures and has strong adhesion properties – these waveguides were designed with no compromises.”

In a collaboration with Dow Corning, the scientists fabricated thin sheets of optical waveguide that show no curling and can bend to a 1 mm radius and is stable at extreme operating conditions including 85 percent humidity and 85°C. This new polymer, based on silicone materials, offers an optimized combination of properties for integration in established electrical printed circuit board technology. In addition, the material can be fabricated into waveguides using conventional manufacturing techniques available today.

“Dow Corning’s breakthrough polymer waveguide silicone has positioned us at the forefront of a new era in robust, data-rich computing, especially as we continue to collaborate with outstanding industry leaders like IBM,” said Eric Peeters, vice president, Dow Corning Electronic Solutions. “Optical waveguides made from Dow Corning’s silicone polymer technology offer customers revolutionary new options for transmitting data substantially faster, and with lower heat and energy consumption. We are confident that silicone-based board-level interconnects will quickly supersede conventional electronic signal distribution to deliver the amazing speeds needed for tomorrow’s supercomputers.”

A presentation, entitled Stable and Easily Processable Optical Silicones for Low-Loss Polymer Waveguides, given here by Brandon Swatowski, application engineer for Dow Corning Electronics Solutions, reported that fabrication of full waveguide builds can be completed in less than 45 minutes, and enable a high degree of process flexibility. Silicone polymer material, which is dispensed as a liquid, processes more quickly than competitive waveguide materials such as glass and does not require a controlled atmosphere chamber.

Swatowski’s presentation went on to say that waveguide builds based on the silicone polymer showed excellent adhesion to polyimide substrates. It also discussed how optical characterization of the new polymer waveguides silicones showed losses as low as 0.03 dB/cm, with environmental stability extending past 2,000 hours exposure to high humidity and temperature, and good performance sustained over 500 thermal cycles between -40°C and 120°C.

Global NAND flash memory market revenue fell 7 percent in 2012 as disappointing Ultrabook sales negated the impact of surging demand from Apple Inc. for its iPhone line, according to an IHS iSuppli Data Flash Market Tracker Report from information and analytics provider IHS (NYSE: IHS).

NAND industry revenue fell to $19.7 billion last year, down from $21.2 billion in 2011. Revenue, however, will pick up this year and rise to $22.4 billion after last year’s stumble, and then continue to expand during the next few years, as shown in the figure attached.

“Because of its high-memory density, combined with high-volume shipments, Apple’s iPhone line in 2012 was the largest single consumer of NAND, helping to increase demand for the memory from the smartphone market,” said Michael Yang, senior principal analyst for memory & storage at IHS. “However, Ultrabook sales fell short of industry expectations, dragging down the overall NAND market for the year.”

iPhone bulks up on NAND

iPhones consumed 10.5 percent of the total NAND flash supply in 2012. In comparison, all other smartphones combined used 10.4 percent. The iPhone in 2012 had an average density of 24.5 gigabytes, a 19 percent increase in density loading compared to 2011. This represents the highest amount of embedded NAND flash among all smartphones.

Middle-of-the-road results for Ultrabooks

A major drag on the NAND industry was the disappointing sales of Ultrabooks, negatively impacting the flash memory prospects of cache solid state drives (SSD) used in the superthin computers. While Ultrabooks have had some success penetrating into the consumer computing experience, adoption overall has been underwhelming, and the incremental increase to demand has been significantly below expectations. And while SSDs achieved significant growth in 2012, the expansion was diminished by the poor results for Ultrabooks.

Windows 8 comes too late

Microsoft Corp. also didn’t help matters by deferring the launch of Windows 8 until Oct. 26, which left little time to generate interest among consumers and the corporate sector alike. As a result, PC shipments in the third quarter last year saw a substantial quarterly decline as consumers waited out the new operating system, and high inventories of older Windows 7-based PCs remained in the supply chain well into the fourth quarter.

NAND suppliers react

Such mishaps, along with overall muted demand, prompted the NAND industry to slow production midway through 2012. Suppliers took action to prevent what would have been a disastrous year for all, and a shrewd move to stabilize pricing in August ultimately led to a minor rally in October. Even so, the second half last year turned out to be weaker than expected despite solid results in the third quarter, blunting growth and resulting in the contraction of industry revenue by the end of last year.

NAND flash manufacturers will need to continue to tightly manage their supply for the first half of 2013, as the first six months of the year traditionally are the weak period for the industry. And with the market moving away from low-margin applications like flash cards and universal flash drives toward higher-value applications, the success of NAND flash players will be increasingly dependent on a smooth transition from acting solely as pure-play sellers to that of providing complete solutions, IHS iSuppli believes.

Three devices to prop up the NAND space

The fate of the NAND industry in the near and intermediate term rests on the support of three pillars of demand: smartphones, tablets and SSDs. Smartphones, for instance, historically provided important growth in NAND flash bit demand. And while growth is starting to slow when compared to the earlier boom years, the smartphone engine will not run out of steam anytime soon.

In comparison, tablets have only recently become a major driving force for NAND demand, with other tablet manufacturers and operating systems beginning to give Apple’s iPad some serious competition.

For their part, SSDs are still in their nascent stage despite making up a notable portion of NAND demand, as suppliers are still waiting for the tipping point when consumers fully embrace the new drives.

Moving forward, 2013 will mark the start of another expansion period for the industry. Robust growth is expected, balanced with technology advancements and production expansion. In particular, the second half of this year will be healthy, boosted by increased demand throughout the NAND portfolio.

A new report from IHS Displaybank examined a total of 483 patents on roll-to-roll processing technologies, focusing on 32 that were flexible, OLED-related. 43 flexible OLED-related roll-to-roll application technologies and 23 roll-to-roll patents by SiPix were also selected for an analysis. 

A flexible display is considered as the next-generation display that is bendable and rollable without damage, by using a paper-thin and flexible substrate. The flexible display market is projected to lead the market growth by creating a new display market as well as by replacing the current display market. In addition, when producing flexible displays, if a large-area and low-cost technology based on the roll -to-roll process is realized, new demands with such as indoor/outdoor advertising and various decorative purposes are expected to be created.

The roll-to-roll process is a foundation to mass produce flexible electronics applications at low cost. It is a greatly demanded technology in the related-product manufacturing industry. The technology at the present level allows high speed printing, but the ink viscosity and the resolution vary depending on the printing method, and the equipment research on the device manufacturing process has not yet conducted enough.

The report contains the application trend and in-depth analysis of key patents on the roll-to-roll processing technology.

Looking at the application trend of 483 patents on roll-to-roll processing technology, the number of applications has continuously increased since mid 2000s, and many were applied in the U.S. Major applicants include 3M Innovative Properties, SiPix Imaging, Fuji Film, and General Electric. Amid vigorous developments of roll-to-roll processing technologies, competition among companies in the U.S., Japan, and South Korea gets increasingly fierce.

Roll-to-roll Processing Technology Patent Application Trends by Year/Country

 

Source: Displaybank, “Key Patent Analysis—Flexible Roll-to-roll Processing Technology”

Of a total of 483 roll-to-roll processing technology patents, 23 flexible OLED-related U.S. published/issued patents and 9 international patents were extracted as key patents. In-depth analyses were conducted on the 32 key patents after divided into the roll-to-roll manufacturing processing technology and apparatus technology. The key patent analysis includes key patent status, technology development map, and abstract.

Spending on research and development by semiconductor companies grew 7% in 2012 to a record-high $53.0 billion, even though the semiconductor market declined 1% to $317.6 billion, according to the 2013 edition of IC Insights’ McClean Report.  The increase lifted R&D spending by chip companies to 16.7% of total semiconductor sales in 2012, the highest level since the peak of 17.5% was reached in both 2008 and 2009.

For more than three decades, R&D spending as a percentage of total semiconductor sales has trended higher due to increasing costs associated with developing complex IC designs and creating next-generation process technologies to manufacture these circuits.  In the late 1970s and early 1980s, R&D spending as a percent of semiconductor sales by chip companies was typically 7-8%.  R&D-to-sales ratios grew to 10-12% of revenues by the early 1990s and then jumped to over 15% during the last decade, reaching a record 17.5% in 2008.

However, as shown in Figure 1, not all companies have seen a growing portion of sales consumed by R&D.  For example, Samsung’s R&D-to-sales ratio fell from a peak of 25% in 2001 to 8% in 2010 and has remained there since.  

Samsung’s semiconductor business is more capital-intensive than it is R&D-intensive because of the commodity nature of the DRAM and flash memory businesses in which it mainly participates.  As a result, since 2001, Samsung’s semiconductor sales have grown an average of 16% per year, while its R&D spending has increased at about one-third the rate (5%) and it’s capital expenditures have grown by an average of 19% annually.  The main focus of Samsung’s investments is in adding new fab capacity for large-diameter wafers (currently 300mm but heading toward 450mm later this decade).

Intel’s business is also capital-intensive.  Its spending on new fabs and equipment in each of the past two years was about $11 billion, which was only about $1 billion shy of what Samsung spent in each of those years.  Intel’s advanced microprocessors and other incredibly complex logic devices have very short life cycles.  Spending large amounts of money on research and development is part of its business model.  Intel’s $10.1 billion in semiconductor R&D spending in 2012 was more than 7x the amount spent by second-place Qualcomm!  In fact, Intel spent more than one-third of the combined $28.7B spent by the top-10 R&D spenders in 2012, according to the 2013 McClean Report.

Figure 1 also shows how much the industry’s largest pure-play foundry, TSMC, has been spending on R&D as a percent of sales over the past decade-and-a-half.  As the process technology needed for each new generation of ICs has become increasingly difficult to develop, fabless companies and the growing number of fab-lite companies have come to rely on TSMC not only for fabricating their wafers, but also for helping to bring their IC designs into existence.  As a result, TSMC’s R&D spending-to-sales ratio has been gradually climbing over the past 6-8 years.  TSMC’s spending ratio reached 8% in 2001, but that had a lot to do with the fact that its sales were hit hard by the industry recession that year.  Aside from a small dip in 2009, TSMC’s spending on R&D has grown every year since 1998 and at an average annual rate of 25%!  Over that same 1998-2012 timeperiod TSMC’s sales grew an average rate of 19% per year.

Facing a relentless onslaught from tablets, smartphones and solid state drives (SSD), global hard disk drive (HDD) market revenue in 2013 will decline by about 12 percent this year, according to an IHS iSuppli Storage Space market brief from information and analytics provider IHS (NYSE: IHS).

Revenue is set to drop to an estimated $32.7 billion in 2013, down 11.8 percent from $37.1 billion last year. HDD revenue will be flat the following year, amounting to $32.0 billion in 2014, as shown in the figure.

“The HDD industry will face myriad challenges in 2013,” said Fang Zhang, analyst for storage systems at IHS. “Shipments for desktop PCs will slip this year, while notebook sales are under pressure as consumers continue to favor smartphones and tablets. The declining price of SSDs also will allow them to take away some share from conventional HDDs.”

HDD gross and operating margins likewise will decline as a result of continued price erosion. “However, HDDs will continue to be the dominant form of storage this year, especially as demand for Ultrabooks picks up and hard drives remain essential in business computing,” Zhang added.

HDD vs. SSD

HDDs overall will maintain market dominance because of their cost advantage over SSDs, particularly when higher densities are involved and dollars per gigabyte are calculated. HDD costs and pricing are significantly lower than SSDs, with already falling HDD average selling prices expected to decline further this year by 7 percent.

Moreover, HDDs will continue to be part of storage solutions even in Ultrabooks that make use of an SSD component. The solution, which cobbles hard disk drives together with a so-called cache SSD module, boasts of a superior price-value proposition compared to SSD-only counterparts.

A major growth area for HDDs will be the use of hard disk drives in the business sector spanning the enterprise space, cloud storage, big data and big-data analytics. Bearing the lowest cost of any storage medium now on the market, HDDs will remain the final destination for the majority of digital content that need to be filed away. And toward the last quarter of this year, Western Digital is expected to launch a 5-terabyte Helium HDD, catering mostly to data centers for enterprise servers and storage applications, further propelling the HDD space into overdrive.

Western Digital vs. Seagate

Western Digital is expected to continue battling archrival Seagate Technology for market leadership in both revenue and shipments, especially in the enterprise business segment. While Seagate had a 50 percent share of the enterprise market last year, the introduction by Western Digital of its new helium technology could catapult the manufacturer to the top at the end of 2013, dethroning Seagate in the process.

Optical drives vs. extinction

In the parallel market for PC optical disk drives—home to discs like CDs and DVDs—losses in both revenue and shipments are similarly expected. The declines stem from a number of reasons, including smaller chassis sizes for PCs, a shift in preference among consumers toward video streaming instead of using physical discs, and cost cutting from PC manufacturers that have lost interest in using optical drives.

In what appears to be a grim scenario, the optical disk drive industry is expected to encounter continued challenges this year, such as those presented by thinner PC designs. Optical drives could eventually be abandoned by PC makers altogether.

Five University of California, Riverside professors will receive a total of $5 million as part of a $35 million research center aimed at developing materials and structures that could enable more energy efficient computers, mobile phones, and other electronic devices.

The research center, which will be called the Center for Function Accelerated nanoMaterial Engineering (FAME), will be located at UCLA and led by Jane P. Chang, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at UCLA.

Four professors from UC Riverside’s Bourns College of Engineering are part of the center: Alexander A. Balandin, Alexander Khitun, Jianlin Liu and Roger Lake, all of whom are part of the electrical engineering department and materials science and engineering program. Jeanie Lau, a professor of physics and astronomy who is also part of the materials science and engineering program, is the fifth professor. Each professor will receive about $1 million.

FAME is one of six new university microelectronics research centers recently established with $194 million over the next five years from the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The funding supports the continued growth and leadership of the U.S. semiconductor industry.

The other five centers will be located at UC Berkeley, University of Michigan, University of Notre Dame, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and University of Minnesota.

The University of Minnesota center is called the Center for Spintronic Materials, Interfaces and Novel Architectures (C-SPIN). Three UC Riverside researchers – Roland Kawakami, Ludwig Bartels and Cengiz Ozkan – received a total of $3 million as part of that center.

The goal of the FAME center is to create and investigate new nonconventional atomic scale engineered materials and structures of multi-function oxides, metals and semiconductors to accelerate innovations in analog, logic and memory devices for the semiconductor and defense industries.

The center includes 35 faculty researchers from 16 universities: UCLA, Columbia, Cornell, UC Berkeley, MIT, UC Santa Barbara, Stanford, UC Irvine, Purdue, Rice, UC Riverside, North Carolina State, Caltech, Penn, West Virginia and Yale.

Balandin, Lau and Liu will focus on van der Waals materials – a broad range of crystalline solids with layer structures. The van der Waals materials include graphene, topological insulators and charge-density wave materials. It is expected that this class of materials can be used in future information processing.

Scientists at RTI International are advancing the state of science in electronic devices for optical systems by using superlattice structures to optimize the performance of germanium optical detectors on silicon chips.

Their research, highlighted in the December issue of Nature Photonics, explains their use of thin films to overcome inefficiencies in crystal-structure mismatch between silicon and germanium. This structural mismatch results in an efficiency loss in electronics and is a major challenge in fabrication processes and widespread implementation. 

Solutions to date have mostly focused on engineering the buffer layers between silicon and germanium to accommodate this mismatch, but have yielded insufficient device performance levels. The RTI research team has incorporated a silicon-germanium superlattice structure appropriately to control the electric field in the active region of the optical detector and improve the device performance levels. 

The scientists’ goal is to demonstrate the integration of germanium photonic devices that use light to process information and then interact with silicon electronic circuits that use electrons to process information. Doing so will pave the way for next generation silicon-based optoelectronics for communication, computation and data transfer.

The scientists, Gary Bulman, Ph.D., and Jayesh Bharathan, of RTI’s Center for Solid State Energetics (CSSE), also published this research in the Journal of Electronic Materials. Bharathan is presently pursuing a doctoral degree in materials science and engineering at NC State.  

“This research shows that high-performance germanium photo-detectors can be fabricated on commonly available silicon wafers, using superlattice structures to carefully optimize the devices," said Rama Venkatasubramanian, Ph.D., director of RTI’s CSSE. “This device technology will become important for next-generation communication and computational devices and also appears attractive from a commercial manufacturing standpoint.”

At SPIE Photonics West 2013, imec will present a prototype hyperspectral imager for snapshot and video acquisition. Being fast, compact and cost-efficient, the CMOS-based imaging systems with integrated hyperspectral filters are suited for multiple industrial vision applications. Imec is currently sampling the line scan version of its hyperspectral imaging solution, offering a ready-to-use evaluation kit to the industry to line scan and analyze specific sample material.

Imec’s prototype hyperspectral imager for snapshot and video captures an entire multispectral image at one discrete point in time. The imager is achieved by applying a hyperspectral filter in a novel tiled lay-out on a commercially available CMOS-based image sensor (CMOSIS CMV2000, 2 megapixel, max 340fps). The imager and off-the-shelf fore-optics simultaneously duplicates the scene onto each filter tile, acquiring multispectral image cubes of 256×256 pixels over 32 bands in the spectral range of 600-1000nm at up to 340 cubes per second—compliant to normal machine vision illumination levels. Due to its simple cube assembly process, the camera is able to acquire real-time hyperspectral video.

Imec’s line scan solution monolithically integrates hyperspectral filters on a CMOSIS CMV4000 imager (4 megapixel, max 180fps). It scans 100 spectral bands in the 600-1000nm wavelength range. The filter bandwidth (Full Width Half Max) is about 10nm across the spectral range, with a transmission efficiency of ~85%. The speed of the system corresponds to an equivalent speed of 2,000 lines per second, significantly exceeding current state-of-the-art hyperspectral sensors.

Imec is the first to sample CMOS integrated hyperspectral imaging sensors, giving the industry access to a compelling innovative technology. Evaluation kits of imec’s line scan solution are available now. They are fast and easy to set-up, enabling hyperspectral scanning and analysis of sample material, and delivering relevant test data within a few days after installation. The kits include all required components, from imager to host PC and software, and can be easily rebuilt into different configurations. During the course of 2013, imec expects to also launch evaluation systems compatible with its novel hyperspectral sensor for hyperspectral snapshot and video acquisition.

A*STAR’s Institute of Microelectronics, based in Singapore, signed an agreement to collaborate with Petroleum Geo-Services (OSE:PGS), to develop a high performance MEMS-based sensor for deep sea seismic oil and gas exploration. PGS is a geophysical company headquartered in Oslo, Norway. The MEMS sensor is targeted for incorporation into a PGS commercial streamer system, and will be used to acquire more precise seismic data during seismic survey to locate and estimate the size of offshore oil and gas reserves. The streamer systems are towed behind large ships.

Schematic illustration of a ship towing a large streamer spread with deep towing depth.

The collaboration leverages IME’s experience in designing high performance MEMS sensors, MEMS process platform and in-house packaging capability, and PGS’s expertise in seismic exploration. The project will demonstrate a MEMS sensor and provide guidelines for the packaging and integration with ASIC in the next phase.  

 “Collaborating with an industry leader provides an opportunity for us to further our research in sensing technology for oil and gas applications,” said Prof. Dim-Lee Kwong, Executive Director, IME. “IME’s integrated capabilities and deep understanding of different sensing technologies in MEMS will enhance our partner’s technology development capabilities and shorten the product development time.”

The oil and gas industry uses seismic imaging to provide 3-dimensional images showing the locations of oil and natural gas deposits. Imaging accuracy is critical to determining the optimum location for drilling to increase extraction efficiency. Two critical needs for improving image resolution and fidelity above today’s results are increasing the spatial density of sensors deployed in the field and generating ultra low noise measurements in a wider frequency band.

One of the advantages that MEMS accelerometers have over geophones is the flat frequency response at low frequencies. Unlike geophones which are velocity sensors and operate above their resonance frequencies, accelerometers operate below their resonance frequencies. The small size and lower power consumption of the sensor nodes will significantly reduce the cost of large scale deployments, enabling data from more channels to be collected, thus increasing the channel density in any given survey.

In earlier work between Shell and HP (unrelated to the A*Star/PGS announcement), a MEMS sensor was fabricated from three separate single crystal silicon wafers bonded together and singulated into a small vacuum encapsulated die. The proofmass was suspended by silicon flexures etched through the center wafer. Electrodes were arrayed on one surface of the proofmass and on the stationary wafer opposite the proofmass. A small gap was maintained between the two wafers.

C. Grant Willson, professor of chemistry and chemical engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, has won the Japan Prize, an international award similar to the Nobel Prize. He’s sharing the 50 million yen (approximately $560,000 in U.S. dollars) prize with his colleague and friend Jean M.J. Fréchet, who is now vice president for research and professor of chemical science at King Abdullah University in Saudi Arabia. The winners were announced today in a ceremony in Tokyo. The Japan Prize Presentation Ceremony and Banquet, with the emperor of Japan in attendance, will take place in Tokyo on Wednesday, April 24, 2013.

Willson (left) and Fréchet (right) first conceived of “chemically amplifed resists,” the materials for which they are being recognized, in 1979. Willson was a researcher at IBM Corp., and Fréchet was spending a year with the company while on sabbatical from the University of Ottawa.

“My boss came to me and said there is a crazy Frenchman who wants to come and spend a year here. Will you be his host?” said Willson, professor of chemistry and biochemistry in the College of Natural Sciences and the Rashid Engineering Regents Chair in the Cockrell School of Engineering. “I said, ‘Let me do a bit of research on the guy,’ I looked at his papers and they were excellent. He was really doing good science, so I said, ‘Sure.’ He came to join me, and we started by having a great discussion about photoresists.”

At the time Willson and Fréchet began talking, IBM was the world leader in manufacturing chips. Every two years or so, in keeping with “Moore’s Law,” the company had been able to write smaller patterns on the silicon and thus double the number of devices on each chip. The company was nearing a point, however, when continuing that pace of development did not look possible.    

“We were stuck,” said Willson. “Further shrinking of the devices demanded printing with shorter wavelength ultraviolet light. The light bulbs that were available did not produce much light at the shorter wavelength, and the photoresists then being used took hours to develop in response to the low light. It wasn’t practical in terms of production. So we needed to develop new equipment or find photoresist materials that were orders of magnitude more sensitive.”

Willson and Fréchet proposed using a catalyst to amplify the sensitivity of the photoresist. Instead of being dependent on one or multiple photons of light to trigger a chemical change in one molecule of the resist, with catalysts one photon could in theory set off a reaction that would “chew up” many of its neighbors as well. Thus light from the dimmer short wavelength light bulbs would be sufficient.

“It shouldn’t have worked,” said Willson. “It should have been too blunt an instrument to draw fine lines. If you put a cow in a pasture, it will not stay put. It will wander around and keep eating until it eats up the whole field. Our catalysts should have eaten the whole field, but they didn’t. For all practical purposes, they stayed put. We got very high sensitivity and very high resolution. It wasn’t until much later, actually, after the thesis work of two University of Texas graduate students, that we finally figured out why the reaction is controlled in the way it is. At that time of the invention, though, we just needed to know that it worked reproducibly."

Fréchet, who left IBM at the end of the year, kept collaborating from afar. He and Willson were soon joined by Hiroshi Ito, whom Willson recruited from the State University of New York-Syracuse. Over the next few years the trio developed the process to the point where IBM was willing to put it into production.

“I still remember standing in the clean room at IBM’s facilty in Burlington, Vermont, and watching huge numbers of parts being manufactured with our new material,” said Willson. “It was a thrill that is difficult to describe.”

The chemically amplified resists and their descendants helped IBM maintain its edge in chip production for many years. The patents were licensed in the early 1990s, and many adaptations of the resist were developed. These commercially available materials are now used throughout the industry to enable technologies as diverse as mobile phones, personal computers, home appliances, automobiles and medical equipment.

“The materials have gotten much more sophisticated,” said Willson. “But the fundamental design concept is the same. We made the first cookie, and since then others have made almond cookies and chocolate chip cookies and cookies with a bit of coconut in them that taste better. Hiroshi, who died in 2010, continued to work on chemically amplified resists his entire life and made many important contributions to the modern formulations. If he were alive, he would have shared this prize with us.”

If potential next-generation methods such as extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography prove viable, the resists will live on with them. Ironically, Willson himself has placed his bets elsewhere, on a process called nanoimprint lithography that he and S.V. Sreenivasan, a colleague at the Cockrell School, have been developing and commercializing.

“I think that this whole idea of using lasers and lens and resists has reached its limit,” he said. “It’s been amazing, though, to have played the small part in it that we have.”

Willson and Sreenivasan were honored in 2012 as “Inventors of the Year” by the university’s Office of Technology Commercialization for their nanoimprint lithography technology. Willson was also awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 2007 for his development of chemically amplified resists and advanced patterning technology

The Japan Prize is administered by the Science and Technology Foundation of Japan and honors scientists from around the world who have made original and outstanding achievements in science and technology. This year’s other prize is being awarded to Rutgers University professor John Frederick Grassle for his contribution to “marine environmental conservation through research on ecology and biodiversity of deep-sea organisms.”