Other books by René Raaijmakers

Natlab, Kraamkamer van ASML, NXP en de cd
(Natlab: The Birthplace of ASML, NXP, and the CD – in Dutch, with co-author Paul van Gerven)

ASML’s Architects

René Raaijmakers

Techwatch Books
Nijmegen, Netherlands, 2019

In the early 1970s, engineers at the Philips Research Laboratory in the Netherlands build a machine that promises to be a license to print money. They don’t realize they’ve created a monster that will do nothing but devour money for twenty long years.

“Let's just get started, and solve each issue one by one”
Evert Polak (1944–2014)

Copyright © 2019 Techwatch Books

First English edition

Originally published in Dutch as De architecten van ASML,
copyright © Techwatch Books, 2017.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Typesetting and design: Justin López
Editing: Tjerk Noordraven, Nieke Roos
Printing: Ten Brink, Meppel
Translation: Grayson Bray Morris

ISBN/EAN: 978-90-827074-4-1

asmlbook@techwatch.nl

ASML’s Architects

ASML’s Architects is the translated and updated version of the book De architecten van ASML (2017) chronicling ASML’s genesis. The book covers the era from the pioneering 1960s through the mid-1990s, when ASML definitively broke onto the world stage.

Part two is in the making. Stay in the loop by joining our mailing list at asmlbook@techwatch.nl.

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Part 1: Wafer Stepper Prehistory 1962–1969

1. A Strange Insect

2. Philips Elcoma

3. David Mann

4. Ad Bouwer

5. The Violin Maker

Part 2: A License to Print Money 1970–1975

6. A Born Engineer

7. Travel Companions

8. Technical Note 105/71

9. The Silicon Repeater

10. American Style

Part 3: Death Throes 1976–1983

11. Wim Troost

12. Troost’s Letter

13. GCA Plays Its Trump Card

14. Knocking on the Government’s Door

15. The Electric Wafer Table

16. The Rescue Mission

17. A Brick Shithouse

Part 4: The Deal 1983–1984

18. Arthur del Prado

19. Fifty-Fifty

20. The Contract from Hell

Part 5: A Leveraged Die-Out 1984

21. Gjalt Smit

22. Hoodwinked

23. The Reunion

24. The Deadline

25. A Hundred Million Dollars

26. From Paris to Oberkochen

27. The Company from Hell

28. The Japanese

29. The First Drawings

30. The Cartoon Presentation

31. The First Want Ad

Part 6: The Deadline 1984–1986

32. The Business Plan

33. Landmark

34. Back to Elcoma

35. Victoria Veste

36. Anthill

37. Hotel Victoria

38. The American Market

39. If Something’s Supposed to Come in on Friday, It Isn’t Coming at All

40. Hurry, Hurry, the Future’s Nipping at Your Heels

41. We Can Win This

42. We Hear You, Jerry

43. AMD

44. Smit’s Sounding Board

45. Emergency Meeting

46. Not Wild About Wild

Part 7: The Big Spender 1986–1987

47. Euphoria

48. America’s Toughest Boss

49. Temptation Strikes Del Prado Once Again

50. The Sun Sets on GCA

51. Japanese Reliability

52. Boulevard of Broken Dreams

53. Take It or Leave It

54. Eighty Bucks and Sayonara

Part 8: Running in Place 1988–1990

55. The Fat Man

56. Flat Broke

57. Promising Customers

58. Nikon’s Achilles Heel

59. Cash Flow Positive

60. Turbo Mode Engaged

61. IBM

Part 9: Stuck With Each Other 1990–1992

62. The Circle Sir

63. German Stranglehold

64. A Movie for IBM

65. The Folk with the Golden Fingers

66. Japanese Glass

67. O-Lab

68. Running on Goodwill

69. No-Brainer

Part 10: Growth 1993–1996

70. A Good Team

71. Value of Ownership

72. Scanning

73. The Korean Gorilla

74. Forty Thieves

75. The Medicine Man

76. An Audience with The Tank

77. Grassmann’s Baptism by Fire

78. On Its Own Two Feet

Appendices

Appendix 1

Appendix 2

Appendix 3

Appendix 4

Appendix 5

Appendix 6

Appendix 7

Appendix 8

Appendix 9

Appendix 10

Appendix 11

Appendix 12

Appendix 13

Cast of Characters

Glossary of Terms

Endnotes

Acknowledgements

Interviews (2011–2017)

Afterword

Translator’s Postscript

Preface

In the early 1990s, as a young technology journalist in the Netherlands, I visited Silicon Valley. There, surprisingly, at a conference in San Jose was where I first encountered ASML, a Dutch company that was embroiled in a technology race with the then-unassailable giants Canon and Nikon.

As a student and fledgling journalist in the land of Philips, I’d never heard anything but complaints about the Japanese and the Koreans and the disruptive effect their unfair methods were having. But in the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, my countrymen told me a different story. Whatever else happened, they were going to crush their Asian competitors.

It surprised and delighted me that a machinery manufacturer from a small town in the Dutch deep south was playing such a crucial role in information technology. After that first meeting in the US, I kept a close watch on the engineers in Veldhoven. ASML intrigued me: a small high-tech player from my own homeland was determining the pace of the computer chip industry. What’s more, the company oozed enthusiasm.

It must have been somewhere around the turn of the century that I began to play with the idea of writing a book about ASML’s genesis. It seemed like a fascinating endeavor to lay bare the roots of a Dutch fighting machine that had just beaten the Japanese heavyweights Canon and Nikon.

How can a tiny company succeed where a colossus like Philips threw in the towel? True, after 1984 it took ASML another seventeen years to grow (seemingly from nothing) into the market’s unrivaled leader, but it was a success story to die for. I often wondered: who was behind it, and how had they pulled it off?

Yet for years the project sat in cold storage. The dot-com crisis dealt a heavy blow to my company, Techwatch. I’d founded it in 1999 to publish my own magazine, Bits&Chips. Hit by the severe recession, my bank account was constantly overdrawn in 2002 and 2003, and my three employees and I had to pull out all the stops to keep the place afloat—and what’s more, I had to write the lion’s share of my magazine myself.

Despite all that, in 2003 I visited Wim Hendriksen for a first interview for the ASML book. Wim was part of the first wave of employees who came on board shortly after the joint venture’s founding in 1984. He kept repeating one claim: “ASML as it is today—it was planned that way from the start.” The company’s current culture, its frank, confrontational style of communication, its reckless—“all or nothing”—quest to dominate the market, the revolutionary idea to farm everything out: the seeds were all planted in the earliest days of ASML’s existence.

Every self-respecting journalist takes a claim like that with a hefty grain of salt. Can you conceive the culture and essence of a company that makes extremely complex products in the space of a few months—when the preceding years were a shambles? Can it be true that in the spring and summer of 1984 a culture was sown that would still exist thirty years later? I found it hard to believe. It’s the nature of human memory to distort the past, and by then I’d gained enough experience to know how differently different people can view the same events.

The death of ASML’s former CEO Willem Maris at the end of 2010 was the push I needed to seriously commit to this project. I decided to publish a Bits&Chips special issue on ASML and interviewed several insiders for it. One thing became abundantly clear: ASML’s history is anything but a straight and neatly paved road. On its way to the top, the technology company has gone through some very deep valleys. And many of the stories and anecdotes making the rounds in the Netherlands’ high-tech circles turned out to be quite different in reality. I discovered that the company’s history was riddled from start to finish with the bizarrest of turns. In short: ASML was such a thrilling story that I couldn’t leave it untold.

*   *   *

What did I have in mind when I started? To explain that, I need to tell you a little about my work in the nineties as a freelance science and technology journalist. I enjoyed popularizing difficult subjects, but over the years my interest turned increasingly to the people involved. In particular, it was endlessly fascinating to listen to the absolute kings of technological innovation: the researchers at Philips’ physics laboratory, Natlab. It was my great luck to speak with those brainiacs regularly in the nineties, mostly to fuel my contributions to the science insert of a respected national newspaper, the NRC Handelsblad. Whenever the bastion of cutting-edge research had an interesting story to tell, I was usually the first one they called.

Those interviews were definitely experiences. They touched on not only the technology, but also market opportunities and what the inventions and systems meant for society. Natlab’s scientists and engineers had the most fascinating stories. Searches that took years, intense collaboration and, above all, a lot of bureaucratic tussles with managers and product divisions. The Natlabbers often had a strident opinion of Philips’ bureaucracy, too, and the ineptitude and incompetence at the top. And they were perennially skeptical of commercialization.

Engineers are often dismissed as nerds. In popular stereotype, they’re socially awkward people, folks who fall somewhere on the autism spectrum. But the engineers I encountered—certainly the inventors at Natlab—had extremely multifaceted interests, cavernous knowledge, and usually a strong opinion on the impact of their work. They brought the technical world to life for me. And rarely were they the awkward dorks of stereotype; rather, they were well-rounded and socially fluent people.

To be clear: often they were, indeed, nerds of the first order. The inventor of ASML’s electric positioning table, Rob Munnig Schmidt, has kept searching for the ultimate audio amplifier even in retirement; Natlab director Hajo Meyer made another fifty concert violins after he retired, using a scientific approach he described in academic articles on acoustics; Natlab director Marino Carasso still solders microcontrollers onto PCBs in the basement of his canalside home in Amsterdam.

Because I also wanted to take in the feel of the whole company, from the office desk to the factory floor, I spoke not only with founders, geniuses, and senior management, but also with secretaries, research assistants, machinery operators, service techs, and members of the worker representation council. The trade union official responsible for ASML in its early days also granted me a few hours of his time. All these people often had a very different view of the world than did the company’s management.

So that’s what I had in mind when I was mulling the shape of this book: capturing on paper how all those people had experienced the ASML adventure. I couldn’t avoid the technology on which ASML built its success, but I knew that a story about the people, the culture, the money, and the organization would be far more compelling. Because however brilliant the technology may be, it ultimately forms only a part of ASML’s success—even if technological supremacy was an absolute prerequisite every step of the way.

*   *   *

But if I wanted to write a book about the people of ASML, how much of the technology should I include? After all, the stars of the story—including senior management—are all engineers, and the company owes its existence to innovations and technological frontiersmanship. That was my biggest struggle in the whole project: I wanted to write a book that would be accessible to everyone, but I couldn’t avoid the technology.

And so, in the fall of 2016, I decided to write two books: a management book and a technical book. I saw the management book as a way to introduce a wider audience to the most extraordinary high-tech company the Netherlands has ever known.

The version of the book you’re reading is the technical one. Several people advised me not to publish this version: too much work, and a commercial clunker. But the reactions I got from readers after we published the (pretty darn technical) book Natlab – Kraamkamer van ASML, NXP en de cd (Natlab: The Birthplace of ASML, NXP, and the CD) told a different story. For people with an interest in science and technology, the more difficult passages posed no problem at all.

Even so, this book is also, first and foremost, a book about people, the engineers behind ASML. I popularize the technology and science as much as I can, to keep technically inclined readers who don’t have the background from tripping over the text. That means engineers who do have the background won’t find any real depth in this book—for them, there’s plenty of other technical reading material available. I only emphasize the technology when I think it’s essential to the story, or of historical importance.

As it happens, no one’s written an extensive popular history of chip lithography yet. There are a library’s worth of books about the semiconductor industry, but these tomes say surprisingly little about the strategic technology at its foundation. That’s why in this technical edition I also talk about developments in the rest of the world—though Japan receives relatively short shrift.

For me, the human element was essential. That’s also the reason why I called this book ASML’s Architects. The name refers to the development of both the wafer stepper and the business.

In science and technology, everyone always refers modestly to the shoulders of giants on which they stand. Researchers and inventors try to downplay their contributions by pointing out they’re building on what their predecessors created. I went looking for those giants, and in this book I’ve tried to shed some light on their contributions.

*   *   *

It takes teamwork to build complex machines. That’s why this version emphasizes the people behind the technology—the engineers. The very first lithographic machine that was developed in the Netherlands, the photorepeater, wouldn’t have been as perfect if Frits Klostermann and Ad Bouwer hadn’t pushed themselves and each other to their very limits.

This approach has always been crucial. The intensive exchange of ideas—also known as reviewing in today’s jargon—is indispensable in making complex systems like steppers, and it’s a central theme running through ASML’s entire history. The way the company’s engineers still do this, the way they hold their discussions on the absolute cutting edge of both the science and propriety, has been taken to truly legendary extremes.

I wanted to bring this engineering culture to life. That means this book isn’t a quest to name every participant and the credit each is due, either. I’ve limited myself to the key players, and even there I know a few are missing.

After so many years, it’s hard to get a grip on the exact historical course the technology took. Only rarely are brilliant inventions attributable to individuals, and even they usually drew their inspiration from their teams. Even the names on the patents (and their order) don’t always do the reality justice.

Most of all, I wanted to make the technical world accessible. To that end, I’ve highlighted a number of extraordinary or exciting events and discoveries, and only briefly noted the parts that seemed to me more boring—or simply left them out.

*   *   *

I spent seven years working on this book. I loved reliving the entire adventure from my perspective. The amazing events, the roller coaster ASML has been on for its entire life, the paranoia in the chip industry, and especially the many interviewees and the openness with which they spoke with me, have repeatedly given me that extra push and motivated me to take the time I needed for the book. One interviewee was even glad for the opportunity to confess. He felt he’d behaved so badly during his years of research that the thought of a printed confession helped to ease his sense of guilt.

Running your own company—in my case, a publishing house—is sometimes hard, but more often it’s a blessing. Because when you’re writing a book, a company like mine provides an extraordinary number of conveniences. For example, it takes at least half a year to transcribe three-hundred-plus hours of interviews. I could turn all that work over to our student interns. And business kept running as usual during the many months when I spent the bulk of my time writing. Last but not least, it’s just plain exhilarating to be in an environment where you can tell the occasional anecdote and share your struggles in the knowledge that your colleagues will understand you.

*   *   *

To me, the most intriguing task was testing Wim Hendriksen’s claim that ASML as it is today was planned that way from the start. Objectively speaking, ASML had a chief architect and that was Gjalt Smit. He was the one who defined the company in its first months. That this architect was full of himself and had a nearly evangelical zeal to crow about his ASML adventure didn’t make things easier. At first, I was worried the whole story would turn into a hagiography, and in that case there’s only one thing a journalist can do: launch an exhaustive search for opposing voices and less adoring perspectives.

And what do you know: Gjalt Smit was decidedly no saint. His arguments with shareholder Arthur del Prado were notorious—Smit has never given any details on those, and Del Prado also declined to discuss their struggle, but former colleagues had been present. And only just this past year did it become clear to me that three and a half years into ASML, Smit’s expiration date had arrived. He was the right man at the right time. After that, many people were glad to see him go. To be honest, I was relieved: Smit turned out to be human, too.

But even though Smit was spat out by many at the end of his ASML tenure, everyone affirms that he delivered a miraculous effort. He planted the seed—whatever the cost and at lightning speed—that enabled ASML to grow from an insignificant minor player to a global superpower. The world got a taste of that even during Smit’s short reign. In 1984 ASML was a nobody; at the start of 1987, the New York Times mentioned the company in the same breath as Canon and Nikon.

The first fifty employees who came from Philips formed ASML’s technological DNA. The most extraordinary thing is that Gjalt Smit turned that burned-out jumble into an impassioned team, and a completely different culture emerged. Dozens of people confirm that the credit belongs to him. The words that Smit used in 1984 and 1985 apparently made such an impression on his colleagues that many of them were able to recite his words back to me verbatim in interviews. I, too, experienced how talented Gjalt Smit is at stakeholder management. When it became clear to him that this book was a serious project, he regularly carved out time during his trips from his home in Switzerland to the Netherlands to speak with me and answer my questions.

ASML is also the story of a merciless work culture. Around the turn of the millennium, I interviewed one of the millionaires who said farewell to the company after cashing in his shares. He was years away from retirement age, so I asked him why he’d left ASML. It was a fantastic company, wasn’t it? But at that time he was worn out, and this is how he described it: “Look, eighteen-wheelers are built to do sixty miles an hour. You can make them do ninety, but then you wear them out faster. At ASML, I spent seventeen years doing ninety.”

ASML is a success story, and for that reason alone this book differs substantially from the books that have been written about other major Dutch companies such as the ABN AMRO bank (De prooi – The quarry), Philips (Kortsluiting – Short circuit), and AOL rival World Online (Nina). There, the sources are people with lingering resentment and scores left to settle. In my case, I was often talking with people who looked back proudly on their experiences and were eager to share them with me. But even this success story has notes of doubt, revenge, euphoria, and hubris.

The extraordinary thing about this story is that people so often wanted to talk frankly about their own character flaws, miscalculations, and mistakes. To me, ASML’s success is built on candor, and I’ve made grateful use of that openness and honesty.

I confronted many people with less flattering memories. The extraordinary thing is that though they occasionally protested, no one tried to put a different twist on the story.

In the project’s final months I realized there’s no such thing as partial transparency. I was given access to piles of confidential information that gave me ammunition for further questions. That, I believe, is the major value of, and the courageous thing about, honesty: you transcend yourself by making yourself vulnerable.

All in all, I still think it’s an amazing story. Amazing that ASML made it in the first place; amazing to see what you can accomplish with the right people, the right knowledge, a giant sack of money, and the right decisions. Amazing, too, how companies can be entirely dependent on events over which they have absolutely no control. In that regard, I agree with what Gjalt Smit wrote in his own, unpublished memoir on ASML: “I strongly doubt that given the same parameters today the same company would emerge again—if, indeed, any company at all.”

René Raaijmakers

Introduction

Thirty-some years ago, the entire lithography market for chips was controlled by GCA and Nikon. The entire market? No—a tiny machinery manufacturer in the unassuming Netherlands kept bravely resisting the gorillas and made life decidedly difficult for the Americans and the Japanese.

The boys from Holland weren’t satisfied with the status quo. They wanted to conquer the world. It took nearly ten years before there was real progress on that front, but by the mid-nineties a rise to prominence could finally begin that, another decade later, would result in absolute control of the market.

After that the technology company continued fearlessly on. Now, another ten-plus years later, ASML makes machines that can print such fine-scale structures at such immense speed that no other company in the world can match them. The tiny Dutch town of Veldhoven sets the pace of information technology; it dictates the speed at which chips across the world grow in computing power and information density.

ASML is now an unparalleled success. Its share price has been higher than that of its former parent, Philips, for years. It’s the superlative case on many fronts: it’s the Netherlands’ largest exporter, it provides the most jobs in the country’s technical sector (counting its high-tech ecosystem), and it’s the world’s biggest machinery manufacturer for the chipmaking industry.

With a chip lithography market share of 70 to 80 percent, ASML has been leaving Canon and Nikon in the dust for years. But not only that. It’s still investing heavily in the development of ever-smaller chip structures. The current efforts to do that using extreme ultraviolet light are so complex that no other company dares to invest seriously in it. It’s an effort we can safely compare to the American Apollo project, and it probably even outshines that.

In the past decade, the company has moved up in the general public’s awareness—largely thanks to its performance on the stock exchange and the publicity that has generated. But the general public knows very little about how ASML made it so far, where it derives its strength, and what lay the groundwork for its rise to prominence. This book aims to change that.

Part 1

Wafer Stepper Prehistory
1962-1969

1. A Strange Insect

Leo Tummers asks the young engineer Frits Klostermann to build him a chip. Natlab doesn’t yet have the micropatterning technology the endeavor requires, so Klostermann decides that first, they need to build a new machine.

At the start of the sixties, the Philips Physics Laboratory—Natlab for short—is a superuniversity where only the best and brightest are welcome. At its facility on Philips’ industrial campus in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, these whiz kids are free to conduct research under ideal conditions: they don’t have to teach class, and Natlab’s budgets are virtually unlimited.

More and more technology is going into products, and Natlab plays a starring role as Philips’ innovation machine. Everything the lab touches seems to turn to gold. A battery of products serves as proof: televisions, radios, fluorescent lights, tape recorders—and the list goes on. Progress seems unstoppable, and meanwhile plans have been made to move the lab to the neighboring town of Waalre to enable further growth.

In 1961 Frits Philips, the son of founder Anton, takes the helm of the global company, which at that time has 230 thousand employees and a revenue of $2 billion. Philips is utterly convinced that its research lab in Waalre will swell to three thousand employees. It welcomes young technical talent with open arms.

*   *   *

Frits Klostermann is twenty-nine when he signs on with the illustrious lab in September 1962. Bright young minds usually start a few years earlier, but he has a long road behind him.

Klostermann is the youngest member of a family whose roots lie in the North German city of Oldenburg. The family began trading in textiles, leather, and shoe care supplies in the Netherlands at the start of the nineteenth century. Klostermann begins elementary school in 1939, but dyslexia hounds him. Reading, arithmetic: everything is hard. But he grows out of it. After completing high school with an emphasis on math and physics, he enrolls in the engineering program at a local community college, and spends his practicum year working in German and English machine factories. He graduates with honors, and the dean of the college strongly encourages him to study physics at the Delft University of Technology—the Dutch equivalent of MIT.

Klostermann isn’t eligible for government student aid in the Netherlands, because he’s still a German citizen. But the dean of the community college arranges an interest-free loan from a regional student loan provider. He’s on his way to Delft.

After he graduates, Klostermann applies to Natlab on the advice of his TU Delft professor. And that’s how the young engineer winds up in Leo Tummers’ group, where he first hears of integrated circuits—ICs, or chips for short.

Tummers, section director Piet Haaijman, and managing director Evert Verwey form the trio that sets the course for Natlab’s semiconductor research in the sixties and seventies. When Klostermann arrives, the atmosphere in Tummers’ group is excited. A few months earlier, Haaijman brought back a chip from his fact-finding tour of the United States: a single slice of semiconductor crystal onto which various electronic components have been soldered and integrated. It’s created quite a stir. The chip’s import is evident: the Americans have made a giant leap forward in reducing the cost of electronics. The three men realize they’ve missed the boat, and Tummers orders several of his researchers to drop everything and throw themselves at the new technology.

Tummers has permanently installed a microscope with Haaijman’s chip on it in his group’s wing of the building.¹ As a statement, there to be seen by anyone who still has doubts about the future. “Look at this,” he tells Klostermann. “If they did it, we can do it, too.” Klostermann peers through the microscope and sees, for the first time, what a chip looks like: some kind of strange insect, glittering in all the colors of the rainbow.

For most of the researchers who arrive at Natlab in the fifties and sixties, the first year is a relaxed one. They do a little looking around, spend a few gentle months getting up to speed, and then choose the project that most interests them. Klostermann also starts off by getting up to speed, but the crystalline insect injects a sense of urgency. The head of his research group intends to catch up to the Americans.

Tummers asks Klostermann to put a shift register on an integrated circuit. At the time, a shift register consists of separate elements soldered together: transistors, resistors, diodes, and capacitors. Klostermann’s task is to integrate all those components and connections on one small piece of silicon. In other words, to turn them into a chip.

*   *   *

Meanwhile, in the US the Pentagon and NASA are pumping billions into chips. For more than a decade, the American military apparatus has witnessed the major advantages that miniaturization offers. It’s the era of the Apollo missions and the intercontinental Minuteman missiles. The defense industry is spurring its scientific and industrial colleagues to place all their bets on the new technology. The increasing demand for chips is also kicking the development of chip production equipment into overdrive.

There, too, the defense and aerospace industries play a galvanizing role. For example, at the end of 1960 the US Air Force awards Texas Instruments a $2.1 million contract to develop custom processes and instrumentation for ICs. The first specialized chip machinery manufacturers arise in that period. Chip production steadily grows, giving the Americans a head start over the Europeans. They achieve greater yields and succeed in dramatically lowering their prices in a short time.

The European industry is also throwing itself into chips, but in the early sixties the effort transpires almost entirely behind the closed doors of behemoths such as Philips, Siemens, and Telefunken. These companies have deep pockets, but they lack the electrifying ecosystem being created by countless specialized startups in Silicon Valley (appendix 1).

At Natlab, the technology to make semiconductor components such as diodes and transistors is well within reach. Researchers need only snap their fingers and the glass blowers and job shop technicians jump to provide them with measuring instruments, vacuum bell jar evaporators, diffusion furnaces, and other equipment.

Klostermann is surrounded by inspiration in his quest to build an integrated circuit; his officemates Albert Schmitz and Piet Jochems have already earned their stripes in transistor manufacture. His biggest problem is the photographic equipment. Natlab lacks the optical instruments to make contact masks that contain very tiny patterns. Those masks are required to lithographically print the patterns onto silicon wafers.

Klostermann can have the masks made in the US, but that will take months. And so he decides to develop an imaging device himself. In a few months’ time, the young engineer creates his first configuration. “A simple projection system has been constructed, which seems to produce photographic images of sufficient quality,” Klostermann writes in his report on the final quarter of 1962.

*   *   *

In the year that Klostermann spends thinking about his system, the David Mann division (appendix 2) of the Geophysical Corporation of America (GCA) has developed a similar device: the photorepeater. By then, the company has even sold dozens. Several chip manufacturers are using Mann’s photorepeater to make the contact masks they use to print transistor patterns onto silicon wafers.

At Natlab, Haaijman asks Klostermann to switch his focus to photomask production and to transfer to Henk Jonker’s photochemical research group. There, he’ll be able to throw all his effort into his step-and-repeat camera.

But when Klostermann arrives in the group, he discovers that Jonker’s priorities lie entirely elsewhere. Jonker puts Klostermann’s efforts on hold. Instead, he’ll run the technical service group tasked with producing contact masks and advanced photographic negatives for a variety of customers.

The scientist Klostermann is now a manager. He follows Jonker’s orders without argument. Not that the young engineer is eager to run a service department; but he’s a principled man who respects authority, not someone who thumbs his nose at the hierarchy so common to his era. He understands there’s work that has to be done. What’s more, he and Jonker get along well. The two are on a first-name basis from the start.

*   *   *

Henk Jonker knows that Klostermann has his heart set on making his own step-and-repeat camera for integrated circuits, but that plan isn’t fast enough for Jonker. It could take years to build such a complex device. He knows that Philips’ Electronics Components and Materials division—Elcoma for short, the predecessor to Philips Semiconductors—has already bought a David Mann repeater for its fab in Nijmegen, to make the contact masks for transistors.

Jonker chooses the same practical path. He wants to catch up to the Americans by buying Mann devices, too. Klostermann disagrees; he wants to build his own machine. But he doesn’t protest. He knows his boss is a man of few words, someone who brooks no argument. Jonker is eager to move forward, and in May 1963 he places an order with Mann for a photorepeater.

A month later, the David Mann Model 1080 arrives in Eindhoven, and Klostermann fires it up. The step-and-repeat camera has a traditional design and build. The single-barrel projection system shrinks the images by a factor of ten or three using a microscope objective on a high-resolution plate from Kodak. The glass photographic plate lies on a carriage like the ones commonly used in lathes: with a hand-scraped prismatic cast-iron guideway.

Movement in both coordinate directions is accomplished using lead screws. In one direction, the operator has to manually twist the screws. Once everything’s in place, the photorepeater can image a whole row of patterns. A small motor moves the carriage holding the photosensitive plate past the microscope objective. The flash is controlled by a pulse counter that receives its signals from a rotation sensor on the lead screw. After the set number of pulses, the controller triggers the xenon lamp. The lamp flashes—click, click, click, click—burning the patterns into the photosensitive slide on the fly.

Klostermann has little trouble using Mann’s step-and-repeat camera, but he doesn’t have time to work on the design for his own imaging device. The touted freedom enjoyed by Natlab scientists is nowhere to be found; he’s responsible for an entire service department, with all the accompanying bureaucracy and administrative headaches. His world has narrowed to eliminating dust and vibrations (appendix 3). There’s no room for building new gadgets.

The young engineer’s plans have been hijacked, but the American photorepeater does give him the chance to thoroughly study the state of the art. He seizes that opportunity with both hands. He tests the Mann device carefully, repeats the same test patterns multiple times, and measures everything against the SIP and Leitz coordinate measuring machines available at the lab. Using a fountain pen, he fills dozens of pages in his lab journal with long columns of results. He estimates his measurement error to be 0.5 microns at most. Across distances of dozens of millimeters he finds repetition errors of a few microns, though the photorepeater’s spec says that error should be under 1.25 microns.

Klostermann is not impressed. He can respect the fact that Mann’s the first company in the world to deliver this kind of system, but his engineer’s genes tell him it can be done much better.

*   *   *

In November 1964, Klostermann travels to the US to visit several instrument manufacturers. He goes to seven companies and sees photorepeaters, precision cameras, and measurement instruments. On November 19 in Burlington, Massachusetts he shakes hands with Burton Wheeler, who runs GCA’s David Mann division. He inspects the Americans’ equipment and discusses with them the shortcomings of their photorepeater, which at this point he’s been using for a year and a half.

And oh, woe: Mann hasn’t been resting on its laurels. He learns that the American specialists have already sold a first four-barrel photorepeater. It uses the same principle that Klostermann envisioned a few years earlier, namely achieving high precision by imaging in parallel. Mann’s machine has a price tag of $37,500. Klostermann writes it all down in a trip report he sends to twenty of his Natlab colleagues.

2. Philips Elcoma

Philips’ semiconductor division is bumping up against the limits of the available photolithographic equipment. Frits Klostermann finally gets the green light to realize his dream.

In the second half of the sixties, Philips Elcoma’s semiconductor fab in Nijmegen decides to expand beyond transistors and start making integrated circuits. They desperately need a faster and more sophisticated method for making contact masks.² The fab is hitting the limits of the David Mann repeater.³ The American photorepeaters they’ve been using in Eindhoven and Nijmegen have passed their prime. They aren’t accurate enough, and what’s more, they’re too labor-intensive—someone has to constantly man them.

Elcoma’s technical managers regularly discuss this kind of technological challenge with Natlab’s group leaders and directors. Both groups have contacts all over the world. Their chats are also a good opportunity to bring the semiconductor fab up to speed on the latest research. That means Elcoma’s always extremely well informed about Natlab’s optical and mechanical achievements. The research guys are always happy to brag about their hydrostatic bearings and pneumatic technology.

At some point Mat Wijburg, the director of Elcoma’s mask center in Nijmegen, lays eyes on the notes from these discussions. His response is condescending. “They brag about their oil and air bearings, but they aren’t using them to make machines that help us make chips,” he sneers. His comments travel to Natlab in Eindhoven, where they prompt discussions between the two divisions.

Ultimately a decision is reached: the lab will build a photorepeater, and Elcoma’s applied integrated components group will make the electronics, assisted by Natlab’s electrical support team.

*   *   *

In the fall of 1966, Klostermann gets the green light to build his photorepeater. For four long years, the catch-up sprint his former boss Tummers had in mind has failed to occur. Meanwhile, Klostermann has gained extensive experience in lithography. Through all his grappling with lenses, photographic materials, and flash lamps, he’s learned the strengths and weaknesses of David Mann’s instruments through and through.

Klostermann is raring to go. He’s determined to create the perfect photorepeater. To his surprise, his boss Jonker gives him complete freedom—and a generous budget to boot. The engineer expresses his amazement at this to his colleagues.

Klostermann has to figure out how to project the patterns for integrated circuits onto photographic plates. Those plates can then be used to burn the patterns into chips using contact printing. On a glass plate negative, hundreds to thousands of circuits measuring 0.5 to 1 millimeter on a side must be imaged one by one. With massive numbers like these, the exposure process must also be fast if it’s going to be economically viable. Each circuit is made of components just a few microns in size, so above all the process must be extremely accurate.

The ideas he put down on paper four years ago are back on the table. Klostermann wants to anchor six reduction lenses together in a single block and thereby expose six different slides for a single chip at once, each with a different pattern—one for each of the layers in the chip.⁴ “It should be ready for use in April 1967,” he notes in his reports.

Klostermann chooses the same operating principle Mann’s using in its step-and-repeat camera, times six: an imaging system with six flash lamps and six vertically oriented objectives that shrink and project the six mask patterns onto six photosensitive plates that are moved forward by a mechanical carriage. As the carriage moves, a displacement measurement system must pass trigger pulses to the flash lamps, thereby simultaneously creating rows of miniaturized patterns on each of the six photographic plates.⁵

In the fall of 1966, Klostermann tests an initial setup for a single-barrel photorepeater. For the first time, his hands aren’t tied, and he can truly play in the technological wonderland that is Natlab. Almost everything is at his disposal. And anything that isn’t, he can have made for him.

To assess the sharpness and distortion of various flat-field microscope objectives, Klostermann’s assistants use these lenses to take microphotos of test patterns. Some twenty candidates are run through the system in the fall of 1966. “The best results are achieved using optics specially developed by Zeiss for use in microelectronics,” Klostermann reports.

Natlab is particularly blessed with in-house precision technology that can’t be bought elsewhere. In the mid-sixties, researcher Hendrik de Lang in the optical research group develops a linear grating measurement system that’s extremely precise for its time: an optoelectronic ruler that can measure displacement to an accuracy of one-tenth micron (appendix 4).⁶ Using the information provided by the grating measurement system, Klostermann’s photorepeater knows exactly when it needs to flash.

The optics are another story. Klostermann’s standards are high. He wants objectives with a larger field of view than Zeiss’s provide. Philips can’t deliver them. Natlab has optics expertise in house, but nowhere at Philips is there a team that can expertly construct and then reliably mass-produce objectives.

And so Klostermann drafts a package of requirements and knocks on Carl Zeiss’s door in Oberkochen, West Germany. But the company isn’t interested in making a custom lens just for him. The quantities Natlab needs aren’t worth the Germans’ effort. Klostermann can choose from Zeiss’s standard assortment, and that’s it.

But Natlab has connections throughout the world. In France there’s LEP, a branch of Natlab that handles many aerospace projects for the French government in those days. LEP in turn has contacts at CERCO, a small optics specialist in Paris, which has been doing custom work for LEP for years.⁷

At CERCO, Klostermann encounters a dozen polishers and other craftsmen led by Edgar Hugues. The tiny company does a lot of work for the military market. The men at Philips LEP walk in whenever they please and more or less dictate what CERCO’s going to do for them. Klostermann and his six photorepeater lenses fit right in. As soon as CERCO understands what he wants, the company goes to work.

3. David Mann

Natlab’s construction of its own step-and-repeat camera—isolated from the outside world, safe inside the walls of mother Philips—is in striking contrast to development in the US. There the approach is quite different, and the learning curves are as opposite as night and day. David Mann already put a simple device on the market back in 1961. It’s a little rickety, but good enough to make the transistors of the time. At Mann it isn’t engineers and academics who drive the pace and shape of development, but dozens of customers knocking on the precision specialist’s door with their specific problems.

Development is incremental. In the early sixties, Mann’s engineers start out using rotating nuts on lead screws, for example. Only later do they transition, just as Klostermann does, to using linear encoders to achieve greater accuracy.

In the US, Mann’s success spurs several companies to follow suit in the sixties. An engineer from IBM starts his own company, JADE, to make step-and-repeat cameras. Dekacon, Electromask, OPTOmechanisms, Royal Zenith, R. W. Borrowdale, and Yale Micro-Module also step into the budding market. Spectra Physics even introduces a repeater with nine objectives that’s equipped with a laser-based measurement system and a granite stage resting on air bearings. Mann will later turn to laser interferometry as well, after Hewlett-Packard introduces a reliable laser.

Despite the competition, Mann maintains a market share of 60 to 70 percent throughout the sixties, also in Japan. In those days the company is known for its superb quality, and its engineers enjoy a good reputation. “Burton Wheeler, the general manager, was known to be greatly concerned that only the best quality equipment should leave the factory gates,” Rebecca Henderson later wrote in a Harvard University report.⁸ But the market is small, and at Mann the machines are manually assembled in a tiny workshop by a few dozen engineers.

Just like Klostermann, the team at Mann struggles with the extremely high requirements that microscopic imaging places on the optics. In the early sixties, the Americans are still ordering the objectives for their step-and-repeat cameras from microscope maker Bausch & Lomb. The company sends large series of lenses to Mann, where they cherry-pick the best units and send the rest back.

But Bausch & Lomb has a hard time delivering the required quality. Some of the batches that arrive at Mann don’t contain a single usable lens, and as their volumes grow, the engineers’ irritation increases. The precision specialists start searching for an alternative and find a distributor in New York that has Nikon lenses of good quality. The Japanese objectives have another advantage: they’re camera lenses, developed for a larger field of view. They can image an area with a diameter of nearly eight millimeters—and the resolution is significantly better, too. The new lenses enable Mann to start offering step-and-repeat cameras for larger chips in 1969.⁹

4. Ad Bouwer

Frits Klostermann recruits headstrong designer Ad Bouwer to help him build his step-and-repeat camera. The device will go on to make money hand over fist for Elcoma.

Frits Klostermann aspires to perfection, and he takes the time he needs to achieve it. He has access to both theory—the scientists at Natlab in Eindhoven—and practice—the technicians at the chip fab in Nijmegen. He’s immersed in an environment that enables him to build the ultimate photorepeater right out of the gate.

To build his six-barrel repeater, Klostermann approaches Ad Bouwer in the precision engineering group (PEG) in the fall of 1966. Usually, Natlab researchers take their requests to the drafting room, which then guides the PEG’s engineers. But Klostermann is a control freak, more engineer than scientist, and he has practical experience in mechanical manufacturing. He knows his machine requires extreme accuracy and wants to make sure everything goes just as it should. So he prefers to talk directly to the people who are going to turn his ideas into something tangible.

When Bouwer presents his first sketches, he discovers that Klostermann isn’t your average researcher. Bouwer is used to tossing out his thoughts on the fly: this is what you need, this is what will work, so this is what we’ll make. But that’s far too slipshod for Klostermann. This stickler for perfection wants Bouwer to justify every decision down to the last detail. He demands an almost mathematical defense, which stuns Bouwer nearly speechless. Klostermann quizzes him for hours on his proposed approach. Bouwer suffers through every minute.

*   *   *

Just like Klostermann, Bouwer has slowly but surely climbed his way up the ladder. In the fifties he attends Philips’ company school, and thanks to his outstanding intellect is allowed to specialize in instrument-making. At Natlab he matures into one of the company’s best instrument makers. Fifteen years later he’s managing the PEG. Bouwer the engineer will go on to generate patents for ASML, and in the late nineties he’ll even make the drawings for the first EUV wafer scanner prototype.

Bouwer is a gentle man, but his vast experience in building instruments makes him immensely self-confident. It’s hard for anyone to change his mind. Other scientists he’s worked with for years at the lab never argue with him. In his first conversations with Klostermann, he stubbornly clings to his designs and ideas.

However good Bouwer may be, Klostermann finds the designer’s methods sloppy. The instrument maker usually hand-draws a few sketches and schematics, says a few words to explain them, then puts his team of engineers to work. To ensure that things get documented, Natlab’s house photographer usually creates extended photo collections of all the PEG’s creations—after the fact, once the work’s been done.

Klostermann isn’t satisfied with that. The obstinate researcher refuses to be convinced by a little hand-drawn scribbling, arguments that seem vague in his eyes, and a much too breezy appeal to experience. The practical Bouwer brings him down to earth. “Sure, you can specify a tolerance of one micron on a drawing, but that’s of no use to them in the shop,” he fires at Klostermann. The two meet every two weeks and often spend an entire afternoon arguing before they reach agreement—but they always manage to reach it. Sometimes one man wins the day, sometimes the other. It’s a new situation for Bouwer, but as time passes he grows to value his intense discussions with Klostermann.

*   *   *

Natlab may be a bastion of unfettered research in the sixties, but it’s also an institute steeped in rank and class—and Klostermann is a perfect example. In an era when the Dutch are chipping away at rigid social boundaries, he expects his assistants to call him “sir.” They think he’s stiff. A second cultural divide is based on education. Natlab’s scientists have earned their degrees at the prominent universities in Delft, Amsterdam, Utrecht, and Groningen—all of them Philips’ primary suppliers of talent in the decades after the war.

The hierarchy continues above Klostermann. He and Jonker may call each other by their first names, but Jonker never addresses Klostermann’s assistants directly; he doesn’t even say hello when he passes them in the hall. Messages for lower employees always pass through Klostermann. Klostermann and Bouwer address each other formally, even though they occupy roughly the same level in Natlab’s informal hierarchy.

Klostermann’s German roots also give him a courteous side, which he puts to good use. The development of the photorepeater isn’t an official project, but using his charm and power of persuasion, Klostermann succeeds in roping a large number of researchers from other groups into helping him build it. Some researchers and assistants spend days or even weeks working for him, in addition to their official duties.

But no one escapes Klostermann’s critical side. He can be incredibly difficult. In discussions he’s extremely stubborn and slow to capitulate.

His lengthy arguments with Bouwer also continue. How can they make the instrument stable? How can they achieve speed without sacrificing accuracy? What’s already on hand at Natlab? In those days computer numerical control and laser-based measurement systems have yet to catch on in grinding, turning, and milling. Machining is first and foremost craftmanship. With a lot of blood, sweat, and tears the PEG achieves a precision of one-hundredth millimeter on a grinder—and that’s better than they can manage on the mills and lathes of the time.

But Klostermann and Bouwer are in luck. In the mid-sixties, three technologies become available at Natlab in a short time which make it possible to dramatically improve accuracy: the previously mentioned linear grating measurement system, hydrostatic bearings, and air bearings. None of them are commercially available, but Natlab’s job shops can deliver them. The trio of technologies turn out to be crucial in giving the photorepeater the desired precision.

Philips’ step-and-repeat camera. The bottom of three lenses is visible, and below them the positioning table for the wafers. To the left of the lens heads are the reflection phase gratings for reading out the displacement in the x and y directions. Below each phase grating is an optical read head.

Using Natlab’s hydraulic bearing technology, Jos de Gast in Evert Muijderman’s mechanical group develops a linear slide system that moves almost entirely free of friction: a block of steel that floats on a thin layer of oil. This film, just thirty microns deep, ensures the moving metal parts don’t touch one another. An oil pump circulates the fluid at a pressure between twenty and thirty bars. Just as a ship floats on water, so the steel block floats on the oil.

De Gast’s carriages don’t wear down. They float even when they’re not moving, because the oil film is under constant pressure—hence the term hydrostatic bearings. They aren’t plagued by stick-slip,¹⁰ the jerk a mass undergoes when it transitions from standstill to motion; a light tick of the finger is enough to get the whole thing moving.

No friction, no wear: it’s clear these carriages on hydrostatic bearings are way ahead of their time. Natlab’s technology is far superior to the cast-iron slide system the David Mann photorepeater uses. The Mann system is lubricated, but at the microscopic level the metal carriage and slideway do in fact make contact.¹¹

*   *   *

Klostermann learns the importance of a flat carriage from Mat Wijburg, the director of the mask center at Elcoma’s chip fab in Nijmegen. Elcoma has bought David Mann’s six-barrel photorepeater to make high-frequency transistors for radios.¹² But when the mask center starts using the newest Mann repeater, it’s wildly unreliable. The first mask set the device creates has a high yield during chip production, but soon thereafter the quality of the masks plummets.

Wijburg has no idea what’s going wrong and replaces the six microscope lenses by better Reichert objectives. That raises the yield, but the unpredictability is still there. Then Wijburg realizes the device may be suffering from thermal effects, making it deform. He plasters thermometers all over the step-and-repeat camera.

Philips’ step-and-repeat camera (left) with operator. The dark cabinets on the right house all the control electronics, which were designed and built by Philips Elcoma in Nijmegen.

And indeed: the electric motor turns out to warm the slideway on one side, which causes it to warp. As a result the wafer table doesn’t move linearly during the exposure phase, but describes a very mildly circular course. Right after the device has been turned on, the yield is decent, but after a while the repeater produces unusable masks. Wijburg stabilizes the machine by cooling it with compressed air.

But Klostermann and Bouwer are targeting a much higher precision. They’re working on a device that can image not only transistor patterns, but also entire microelectronic circuits. They need an accuracy that’s much higher than the precision with which the slide systems of the time can be manufactured. The system must deviate by less than one-tenth micron from straight. If a carriage’s path is warped, it torpedoes registration accuracy, the degree to which the different masks for a single chip align with one another.

There’s always some deformation, but Bouwer discovers the system is so sensitive he can affect the path the carriage takes by tightening or loosening the restraining bolts that anchor the slideway to the granite base. Any change rotates the bottom (fixed) part of the slideway, and the induced tension is sufficient to correct the carriage’s rotational deviation by a few tenths of a micron—just the amount they need.

Klostermann and Bouwer determine to their satisfaction that the carriages’ lateral deviation is less than 0.03 microns over a length of 100 millimeters. Over a path of 47 millimeters, the carriages rotate less than 0.5 microradians, resulting in a registration error that’s less than 0.16 microns. They can live with that.

*   *   *

Another problem is keeping the projected image in focus on the layer of photoresist on the glass plate negatives. Klostermann has opted to use a numerical aperture of 0.2 to 0.4, fairly large in those days. That gives him a high resolution, and thus sharp images, but it limits the distance over which he can achieve that sharpness (the depth of focus). That’s because the depth of focus is inversely proportional to the square of the numerical aperture. That makes it a real hassle to get the patterns into perfect focus on each photographic plate. Klostermann has to find a way to keep the distance from all six objectives to the photoresist within a tolerance of roughly two microns.

The photographic plates are the major disruptive factor. Kodak’s ultra-flat version has an out-of-flatness tolerance of ten microns over a length of twenty-five millimeters. He realizes that all six lenses can separately track the glass surface at a fixed distance if they can independently float, like six hovercrafts, on compressed air. He describes it a year later in the Philips Technical Review this way: “This difficulty has been overcome by continuously correcting the image distance b while the photographic plate is moving, using the local surface of the plate itself as reference level.”¹³ To do that, he needs a setup in which the lenses have a little bit of play in the vertical direction. Bouwer translates his request into a mechanical solution. He hangs the lenses in a diaphragm, which allows them to flex up and down. The solution is simple, but effective. With a supply pressure of two bars, they can fix the gap height at twenty microns from the photographic plates. The gap height in the air bearing changes by one micron per tenth of a bar, and that makes it easy to keep the distance constant within one micron. Air bearings are the third precision technology trump card from Natlab that Klostermann uses in his imaging device.

*   *   *

Klostermann also writes about the performance of his six-barrel step-and-repeat camera in the Philips Technical Review. The pattern deviation for the six photomasks imaged simultaneously (the registration error) is within 0.1 microns across the entire surface. For photomasks imaged successively, the error in alignment can reach 0.25 microns over a field that’s thirty millimeters on a side. The system can be equipped with two types of lenses, for a reduction factor of 10x or 4x. The resulting field sizes are 4.3 and 10 millimeters, respectively, with details two and three microns wide, respectively. Within a diameter of 1.6 millimeters from the center, the step-and-repeat camera can even image lines that are one micron wide. These are impressive numbers for the time.

In late May 1967, Klostermann and Bouwer are given the chance to demonstrate their six-barrel step-and-repeat camera prototype at Natlab’s research exhibition. The event lets the lab’s scientists show off their latest creations and share their visions for the future. A stand at this annual exhibition is an honor only accorded a select company. The members of Philips’ executive board traditionally attend to soak up the latest technology.

The crowd around the Philips step-and-repeat camera is immense. Even board member Dick Noordhof stops by. Klostermann and Bouwer gush about their machine’s performance, but before they even finish, a table down the way draws Noordhof’s attention. On display is a new washing machine with an automatic balancing system. The board member walks off, his whole entourage in tow, leaving Klostermann and Bouwer behind in a state of shock. A run-of-the-mill consumer product that will be rolling off the assembly line by the ten thousand holds greater appeal for the Philips manager than a complex, cutting-edge device for making computer chips.

*   *   *

But Philips’ chip fabs know exactly what to make of the repeater. In the summer of 1967, Elcoma’s fab receives the first photomasks that Natlab makes using the six-barrel device. The fab wants a machine of its own, and a month later the lab is already building a second one. In January 1968 Bouwer, Klostermann, and an assistant install this double six-barrel step-and-repeat camera in Nijmegen.¹⁴ The process goes off without a hitch.

At Elcoma they’re crazy about the thing. In contrast to the Mann device, the Philips photorepeater isn’t plagued by deformation. The temperature-controlled oil flow turns out not only to be the perfect lubricant, but also to keep the machine’s temperature stable. Once the original masks, the masters, have been aligned, the photorepeater can image a set of six masks fully automatically in three hours. After that, working photomasks for use in production are contact-copied onto durable chrome with an antireflective coating. The device is far ahead of its time, and director Mat Wijburg receives mask orders from every nook and cranny of the Philips conglomerate. Natlab, too, is a customer. Wijburg’s workshop even makes masks for British companies and for Fairchild in the US. The masks sell for $1,400 per set. The step-and-repeat camera is earning the center money hand over fist.

5. The Violin Maker

As one of Natlab’s section directors, former war refugee Hajo Meyer recognizes the value of the optical precision technology that a few years later will serve as a seedbed for the wafer stepper.

In 1950, Hendrik Casimir at Natlab interviews a recent graduate named Hans-Joachim Meyer. Forty-one-year-old Casimir has been leading Philips’ research lab for four years. Before that, he attained widespread renown as a scientist. To the sorrow of many, he turned his back on his academic career to focus on managing Philips’ now famous laboratory.

Meyer and Casimir click from the start. They’re soon engaged in an animated discussion. In 1949 Meyer devoured Aage Bohr’s articles on the characteristics of atomic nuclei. On his advisor’s recommendation, he read Casimir’s articles on the quadrupole moment—the discovery that propelled Casimir to worldwide fame as a theoretical physicist. Young Meyer is thus well versed in the intellectual legacy of the man across from him. What’s more, the material inspires him. His eyes twinkle as he talks about it, and that makes a favorable impression on Casimir.

Meyer’s sparkling enthusiasm is all the more impressive in light of the young physicist’s background. Casimir is interviewing a twenty-six-year-old man who lost both his parents in the recent war, escaped multiple deportations, and barely survived the concentration camp at Auschwitz.

*   *   *

Hajo Meyer is fourteen when he hears that he may no longer attend high school in his home town of Bielefeld because he’s Jewish. It’s November 1938, shortly after Kristallnacht in Nazi Germany. In the panic that follows, Meyer’s parents put him on the train to Amsterdam in the Netherlands, which is not yet occupied. He will never see them again.

Young Hajo arrives at Bergen aan Zee and passes through five refugee centers. He’s bored to death and finds work at a smithy, but the police send him away. Refugees aren’t allowed to work. His mother, who speaks good Dutch, lends a helping hand from Germany. She writes to the Dutch Committee for Jewish Refugees, and her son is subsequently admitted to the Jewish Work Village in Wieringermeer, a vocational training center for refugees. There the fourteen-year-old may attend vocational school, where he decides to learn machining.

It’s heaven for the inquisitive teen. Most of the center’s residents are adults, among them many intellectuals from Germany and Austria. They’re learning a trade so they can emigrate elsewhere: America, Australia, somewhere far away. Meyer befriends a math student from Vienna who tutors him, evening after evening. He also studies physics.

Meyer’s crazy about engineering and music, and in the letters he writes to his parents he begs for car magazines. He can’t get enough of the world around him. He visits movie theaters and museums, enjoys music, and eagerly absorbs all the knowledge that surrounds him. “I’ve finished my math book,” he writes on October 3, 1939. “Can you send me a new one? If so, make sure you buy a very good one, for self-study.”

A convoy of buses disrupts the apparent peace in 1941. A year earlier the Germans invaded the Netherlands, and now they’re closing down the work village. They send most of its residents to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. Meyer, now sixteen, is miraculously spared this fate. He’s allowed to go to Amsterdam, where he may attend the Jewish vocational school after acing its technical admission exams. By then he’s a committed atheist, and he doesn’t really fit into the orthodox environment that surrounds him. But the young man’s eagerness to learn stands out, catching people’s attention, and a loving foster family takes him in.

Through friends, Meyer gains admittance to the Jewish Montessori high school in Amsterdam. There he receives afternoon lessons from the crème de la crème among Dutch intellectuals, all of them Jewish professors fired from their university positions. His foster parents arrange for a well-to-do Amsterdam family to pay his tuition. Amazingly enough, the Gestapo decides the private Montessori school may hold final exams. After passing them, Meyer goes into hiding in the tiny town of Blaricum. The Germans eventually catch him anyway and put him on a train to Auschwitz.

After a few weeks of backbreaking work in the Polish concentration camp, the Germans order him to the Gleiwitz I railroad labor camp. They need skilled labor, and because Meyer has experience as a machinist, he may repair train cars. It’s his salvation. The eighteen-year-old works alongside German and Polish craftsmen—in a prisoner’s uniform, but the factory is heated. As a Jew, Meyer’s diet is restricted to the meager and tasteless Auschwitz rations, but now and then local Polish girls sneak him some extra bread.

Twice he escapes the gas chamber. The first time, the Germans overlook him during selection. The second time—in January 1945, ten months after his arrival—the advancing Soviets force the SSers to flee, but not until they’ve marched the camp’s residents all the way to the Oder river. “If it hadn’t gone the way it did, I’d be glue, or fertilizer, or shoe polish now,” Meyer later writes.

At the end of the war, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration orders everyone to return to the country where they were first taken. And so a grievously ill and pencil-thin Meyer endures an arduous journey through Odessa and Marseille back to the Netherlands. His parents will not survive the war, but they do write a goodbye letter. They’ve been taken to Theresienstadt, where Meyer senior succumbs to poor health; he contracted tuberculosis a year earlier. His mother takes a cyanide pill she smuggled in with her, after she hears she’s been ordered to Auschwitz.

After the war, the younger Meyer’s excellent final exam scores win him a scholarship¹⁵ to study physics at the University of Amsterdam. Because there’s no money to pay for further study after he graduates, his professor tells him, “You go see Casimir.”

*   *   *

The misery in Hajo Meyer’s life isn’t enough to break him. The twenty-six-year-old physicist is radiant, bristling with energy, and he talks just as enthusiastically about nuclear spin resonance as about art, music, and cars.

Casimir sees a kindred spirit in Meyer. “Well,” he tells the young scientist, “it won’t be easy for you at Philips as a theoretical physicist. So spend half your time as the editor of the Philips Technical Review.” And so Meyer is introduced to a renowned institution: a scientific journal published in four languages that enjoys global fame. He travels the world with his little notebook, writes a lengthy article each month, and becomes familiar with Natlab’s every nook and cranny.

Casimir wants the young researcher to gain a wide range of experience and pushes him toward experimental work, which at Natlab is considered more valuable than theory. So Meyer works in the cryogenics group, among others, and his manager tasks him with writing the very first reports on transistors. Meyer also visits AT&T’s Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, where he and section director Haaijman receive training in the use and manufacture of transistors (appendix 1).

After that, Meyer teaches other Natlab researchers the ins and outs of transistors and how to make them. To share that knowledge with Japanese colleagues, he also spends ten weeks at Matsushita, a company with which Philips has close ties.

*   *   *

The bond between Casimir and Meyer grows. Natlab’s director is fond of the energetic, upbeat young man and he feels a kinship with the young researcher who, like himself, studied theoretical physics. Casimir regularly asks Meyer to visit him at home in nearby Heeze. Sometimes for a glass of wine, sometimes for dinner with their wives. They talk about Casimir’s time with Niels Bohr in Copenhagen, about music, and about philosophical questions.

Meyer goes on to lead the lab’s gas discharge group for a few years, and then in 1964 Casimir asks him to succeed Eddy de Haan as the director of the lab’s vacuum tube research section. In addition to vacuum technology and electron guns, he’ll also be responsible for optics.

As a section director, Meyer is exposed to the turmoil surrounding Hendrik de Lang, one of the few optical engineers at Natlab. De Lang studied under Frits Zernike, the inventor of the phase contrast microscope. He’s an exceptionally bright and creative researcher. His specialty is the conversion of optical signals to electrical ones, a step that’s crucial in signal processing and signal-based measurement and control.

De Lang is not an easy man. At the lab he’s known for being infinitely stubborn and difficult. By the time Meyer becomes his boss, fifty patent proposals are stacked on De Lang’s desk. None of them have ever been submitted, because the recalcitrant engineer is on fighting terms with everyone in the patent department.

Eddy de Haan has been De Lang’s manager for years, and the problem weighs heavily on his shoulders. It’s one of the first things he brings up while he’s training Meyer to take over. “That De Lang’s a very bright kid. But he picks a fight with everyone. See what you can do with these, because they’re important,” De Haan says as he hands Meyer the patent proposals.

One lovely weekend day that summer, Meyer settles into a patio chair to look through the pile. He’s deeply impressed by the work. Meyer is interested in optics, but it’s his experience as a craftsman and machinist that make him realize that machines using De Lang’s inventions could achieve much greater precision. The section director is determined to protect that body of ideas for Philips.

Meyer’s understanding of his optical patents earns De Lang’s respect. All the patents are ultimately filed. A few years later, Meyer will create a research group that combines optics, precision mechanics, and photochemistry. It will turn out to be a crucial decision, one that seeds the ground for the development of the video long-play disc—the predecessor to the compact disc—and the wafer stepper, the lithographic chipmaking machine.

As the sixties progress, Meyer and De Lang develop a friendship. On a personal level, the director and the group leader share a love for music. Both play the violin. Meyer discovers that De Lang is a talented violin maker. I bet I can do that, too, he thinks. His experience as a machinist serves him well there. After he retires in 1984, he immerses himself in the craft and makes some fifty instruments, so good he’s even able to sell them to professional concert violinists. He also publishes scientific articles on acoustics. Accordingly, many a Natlab researcher will later refer to Meyer as “the violin maker.”

Hans-Joachim “Hajo” Gustav Meyer

Part 2

A License to Print Money
1970-1975

6. A Born Engineer

Herman van Heek and Gijs Bouwhuis end up sharing an office—and their shock at how wasteful chip production is.

If anyone can appreciate the engineering that’s gone into the photorepeater, it’s Hajo Meyer. Just like Frits Klostermann and Ad Bouwer, Meyer knows what it means to build something with your hands. When Casimir appoints him section director in 1964, the multifaceted Meyer looks in wonder at the mechanical and optical brilliance around him. The air bearings, the hydrostatic carriages, and Hendrik de Lang’s optical measurement system: it’s a gold mine of precision technology expertise. Meyer admires how Klostermann and Bouwer are using Natlab inventions to build ingenious photomask production machines.

In the late sixties, Meyer reorganizes the research groups under his command. He pulls lithography out of the photochemistry group and moves it to the optics group.¹ He tags Frits Klostermann to head up the group developing the Plumbicon video camera tube.

On November 1, 1969 Herman van Heek and Gijs Bouwhuis take over Klostermann’s old tasks. Bouwhuis worked in De Lang’s optics group for years, but for Van Heek optics is completely new territory. The two will provide scientific support to the lab’s photomask production team.

There are no big new challenges in the last months of 1969. The two focus mostly on the mask department’s daily questions and problems. In those days, the ten women and three men there are busy making masks for printed circuit boards, cathode ray tube electron optics, and chips. Demand is high.

*   *   *

Herman van Heek comes from a Dutch family that made its fortune in the textile industry. Young Herman grows up in Amsterdam and later moves to Leiden, where his father has gotten a job as a professor of sociology. Herman’s inventor’s genes come from his mother’s side. Her family boasts three engineers, including the famous professor Felix Vening Meinesz, the inventor of an optical instrument to measure gravity.

Van Heek studies physics at the university in Leiden and eventually ends up working at low temperatures in the Kamerlingh Onnes Laboratory. Seven of his eight predecessors found jobs at Philips, so naturally he calls the human resources department in Eindhoven at the end of his experimental years. An interview is soon scheduled with Natlab’s various directors, and in 1964 he starts work there.

Where Klostermann is a disciplined, meticulous researcher, Van Heek and his Beatles haircut waltz much more frivolously through life. In his first five years at Philips, he discovers he doesn’t have much affinity for scientific heavy lifting. The fervor with which some of Natlab’s researchers stake out their territory isn’t his thing. In fact, it repels him.

In contrast to Klostermann, Van Heek doesn’t feel much for hierarchy and he isn’t concerned with status—probably because, as a member of a wealthy family, he’s used to moving in well-heeled circles. The newly minted researcher attends an activity for young academics early in his tenure at Philips, and Frits Philips recognizes him while he’s filling his plate at the buffet. “So, Van Heek, I hear your family’s factory has gone belly up,” the founder’s son calls out from down the line. The whole room hears his challenge. But Van Heek doesn’t lose his cool. “The factory didn’t go belly up,” he calls back to the Philips heir. “My family decided they wanted to stop.² But our textile company lasted for eight generations; we’ll see how far yours manages to get.”

*   *   *

When he arrives at Natlab in 1964, Van Heek dives into a wide range of topics. He puts all kinds of semiconductor materials under the microscope, in a quest for computer memories that can provide an alternative to the magnetic-core memories that are still being manually assembled by women in those days. In Leo Tummers’ group, he also works on sensors to measure action potentials in the brain, heart, and muscles. After that, he leaves to spend a year at Mullard Research Labs in England, where he puts together his first instrument: a near-infrared spectrometer to measure air pollution. When he returns to the Netherlands, his work in the gas discharge group is a flop. The scientific research bores him to tears. Atomic absorption, fluorescence measurements, the Zeeman effect: whatever. When he’s feeling peevish, he ridicules his fellow researchers’ behavior and their overblown egos. He has a hard time taking them seriously.

Van Heek just isn’t cut out for research; he’s a born engineer. He’s much happier building something, such as the spectrometer he made at Mullard. In his view, Mother Nature is like a giant cupboard filled with physical effects and phenomena, and he derives pleasure from opening the right drawers to solve his problems.

When Van Heek talks to section director Meyer about his woes, Meyer advises him to apply for the position that’s opened up at the mask center. And so the researcher-slash-engineer ends up in Piet Kramer’s optics group, where he’s put in charge of an applied department, one whose primary activity is photomask production. In those days nearly everyone at Natlab is working on miniaturization, and the mask department can’t keep up with the huge demand for photomasks for all kinds of applications. The daily work of making the masks falls primarily to the assistants. As the team’s scientific conscience, Van Heek immerses himself in the special problems that Natlab researchers and the production people in the industrial divisions bring to his doorstep.

Around 1969, Van Heek sets aside the rigor with which he reported to Natlab’s management in his early years. He’s matured into a self-confident engineer, one who doesn’t see the point in writing more than two sentences to summarize his quarterly results for his bosses—he knows full well that Kramer and Meyer aren’t interested in scientific ego trips and detailed research reports.

Van Heek likes to keep things light. He sees no need for pomp and gravity. In his reports, he even goes so far as to add humorous comments and wittily worded criticism. One of his first reports in the optics group ends with this comment: “The fact that my current lab space is a paltry eighty-five square feet and has no water or vacuum supply makes me feel like a gypsy every time I push my traveling setup down the hall from the water to the vacuum line.”

*   *   *

His first year in the optics group isn’t very exciting. Van Heek has to make sure the mask department has state-of-the-art instruments and technology, but the photorepeater is so advanced he has little need for anything else in terms of imaging. He decides to find out more about the steps that follow, when the photomasks are actually used in production, and what he learns makes him fall out of his chair. The chipmaking process turns out to be extremely, enormously wasteful.

By that time, chips consist of ten or so layers. Each layer needs its own photomask, but after roughly ten contact prints, the masks are damaged to the point of being unusable.³ That means that for every wafer that rolls off the line at the fab in Nijmegen, a photomask gets tossed in the trash. That’s a shame, but the worst part is that barely any of the chips on the wafer work. After just a few print runs, the masks are already riddled with errors. In Philips’ chip fabs, they’re happy if one in fifty ICs for a new design works. There has to be a better way, he thinks. That thought launches him on a several-month quest to find alternatives.

*   *   *

Like his officemate Van Heek, Gijs Bouwhuis isn’t a born researcher. But Bouwhuis comes from a very different background. He doesn’t have a university education. After attending his local vocational school, Bouwhuis joins the army in 1948, and after that he temporarily runs his ailing brother’s liquor store. Washing bottles, keeping the books, that kind of thing. After his brother recovers, Bouwhuis takes the first job he can find: well-paid administrative work at the Netherlands Trading Society.

He’s almost forgotten he also applied at Philips, but after a few months at the bank in Amsterdam an invitation lands in his mailbox. His engineer’s heart starts to beat faster, and he decides to travel south to Philips’ HR department for a career test. There they have a surprising message for him: they think Bouwhuis is best suited to be an interpreter. But the down-to-earth young man doesn’t budge: he wants to be an engineer. In the end they hire him as a Natlab assistant in 1951.

In Piet van Alphen’s optics group, Bouwhuis gets to play with light. He thoroughly learns the ropes in his first years there. He takes evening classes at the company’s internal engineering school and is given the time to immerse himself in the material. He spends months in the library—at Natlab in those days, it was no problem at all to spend your work hours getting up to speed on the available knowledge. He devours technical articles and books, anything that covers optics—often in French, because at that time France is the stronghold of optical scholarship. Bouwhuis is given the opportunity to absorb it all, and to work through the math and physics that underlie optical phenomena. Under Van Alphen and later De Lang, he matures into Natlab’s leading optical expert. He will make vital contributions to the video long-play disc—the predecessor to the compact disc—and to the wafer stepper.

*   *   *

Van Heek has witnessed the horrors of production at the Elcoma fab, and optical engineer Bouwhuis is also well acquainted with the problem’s thorny nature. The appetite for smaller and smaller structures is insatiable, and at Natlab they’ve been knocking on his door to feed it for years. He’s learned the limits of contact printing better than anyone. He calculates how close together masks and photoresist must be printed to minimize the problems caused by refraction along the edges of the microscopic details.

Because the photographic plates and the wafers are never perfectly flat, the fab is also plagued by Newton’s rings, an interference pattern created by the reflection of light between two surfaces. Pressing down hard is a remedy for both problems, but it never works 100 percent. There are just too many irregularities. By this point Bouwhuis is completely fed up with contact printing. He knows the technology is on its last legs for chip fabrication. Now he and Van Heek need to come up with new solutions. They spend months discussing adjustments to the existing technology. They weigh their chances of success. Should they invest their energy in an automated inspection device that can quickly locate defects in the masks? Should they apply oil between the photomasks and wafers during contact printing? Bouwhuis thinks the latter idea is just a kludge.

At some point, the duo has nowhere left to turn. There are no more stopgap measures left to extend the lifespan of contact printing. The only solution is to move from copying the chip patterns at one-to-one scale to projecting them in miniature directly onto the silicon. It’s the obvious answer, but its implementation is sufficiently complex that Van Heek and Bouwhuis haven’t dared to try it so far.

That’s because an extremely difficult problem rears its head. It takes several successive imaging rounds to make a chip, and all those exposures have to overlay one another very precisely. But how does the machine locate the exact placement of earlier exposures? Those earlier images are now hidden under a new layer of photoresist. That, in a nutshell, is the hellish puzzle that Van Heek and Bouwhuis must solve.

Fortunately, their predecessor Klostermann has already laid much of the groundwork. The brilliant thing about his six-barrel photorepeater is that the masks it generates align perfectly with each other. That’s essential in the chip production process: patterns for each layer of the chip that line up accurately. At the fab, it’s usually women whose hands do the work of very precisely lining up the glass and silicon and then exposing them. Van Heek and Bouwhuis are faced with the challenge of achieving that same precision, but their machine has to locate earlier patterns beneath the photoresist and project the new pattern onto them with immense accuracy—and then repeat that feat, many times in a row.

* * *

Van Heek discusses it with his bosses, Kramer and Meyer. They agree there’s no point in trying to further improve the contact mask method. The idea to project directly onto silicon isn’t all that crazy. Klostermann’s photorepeater was a giant step forward for chip production a few years earlier. It enabled Philips Elcoma to transition from making individual transistors to making integrated circuits. Van Heek suggests that CERCO, the optics supplier for the photorepeater, could also help Natlab create optics that image the circuits directly onto the silicon.

Van Heek’s idea to keep progressing down the optical path first embarked on by the photorepeater makes sense. Kramer and Meyer know that Philips’ chip research and production efforts have both taken fantastic strides forward using Klostermann’s device. Looking to the future, a machine that projects directly onto silicon makes sense both scientifically and commercially.

Kramer and Meyer also know that at the start of the sixties, Philips expressed its intent to become a global force in computers and transistors. Ten years later, it’s obvious the company’s future depends on integrated circuits. The companies at the forefront of chip technology can achieve economies of scale and minimize the cost of adding new features to their products. Philips has plenty of those: not only TVs and radios, but also switchboards and computers. Chips are the future of growth, so that’s where companies are investing.

It’s no surprise, then, that the Natlab managers’ eyes start to shine when Van Heek and Bouwhuis present their ideas. The discussion is brief, the costs immaterial. “Go for it,” they tell Van Heek.

7. Travel Companions

Herman van Heek and Gijs Bouwhuis draw inspiration from a trip to the US, where they encounter a vibrant semiconductor industry.

Herman van Heek and Gijs Bouwhuis have been in the optics group for a year when, in January 1971, they travel to the US to attend the first Society of Photographic Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)⁴ conference in Las Vegas. Van Heek is scheduled to give a presentation for Natlab, and he’s dreading it. To him, events like these are just scientific pissing contests: symposia where researchers show everyone how brilliant they are.

By now, Van Heek and Bouwhuis have a pretty good idea of the options for exposing silicon without contact. And so the travel companions take full advantage of the opportunity to explore lithographic techniques in the US. They know that Perkin-Elmer and Ultratech are working on noncontact machines that can expose an entire wafer, with all its circuits, in one go. These one-to-one projection machines don’t reduce the image; the device Van Heek and Bouwhuis have in mind will. The two men soak up inspiration at every turn.

*   *   *

In America, Van Heek and Bouwhuis encounter a vibrant semiconductor industry overflowing with entrepreneurial activity. The sixties have proven that chips provide virtually unlimited opportunities in countless markets. Many startups and established firms are jumping on the new technology, offering expertise, materials, equipment, and engineering services.

Miniaturization is the driving force behind the storm of developments. The appetite for larger memories and greater computing power is insatiable. Chip manufacturers are pulling out all the stops to print thinner lines and to squeeze the highest possible yield from their production process.

Whether it’s the Americans, the Europeans, or the Japanese, everyone is plagued by the limitations of contact printing. Thinner lines also make the contact masks more vulnerable and cause more downtime. It’s a complex balancing act, in which chip manufacturers are constantly tweaking their machines to push them to their limits. But it’s clear to everyone that contact masks have passed their prime. The entire industry is urgently looking for an alternative.

The major chip makers—IBM, Fairchild, Texas Instruments, and AT&T—are all working on the problem and developing their own production equipment. But unlike in Europe, where the major labs at multinationals such as Philips, Siemens, and Telefunken drive progress in integrated circuits, the US is home to a thriving ecosystem in which small, innovative chip companies also play an important role.⁵ Chip prices are falling, even as demand grows.

Particularly the small, rapidly growing semiconductor companies in the US need all their focus on development and production. So they knock on the doors of other companies for their chip machines, and Silicon Valley soon gives rise to a healthy market for production equipment in addition to a thriving chip industry. Both independent startups and established names jump on the opportunity. A new furnace, etcher, or evaporator is easily constructed.

But lithography is another story, even for companies with generous budgets. Just as the military provided the driving force behind semiconductor and chip development in the fifties, so the American defense department is the engine driving lithographic innovation in the sixties. Halfway through the decade, the growing issues with contact masks are evident, and in June 1967 Wright Patterson Air Force Base contracts Perkin-Elmer to develop a system to bypass contact printing. They want a device that will directly project the micropatterns onto a layer of photoresist on the wafer without making contact.

At that time, Perkin-Elmer is a leading American company. The instrument maker in Norwalk, Connecticut has extensive experience in custom optics for scientific work and the defense industry. The US Air Force wants a system that can image an entire mask containing hundreds to thousands of chip patterns in its entirety, one-to-one, onto a two-inch wafer—a disk smaller than the foot of a brandy snifter. In addition, the projector must be able to image 2.5-micron details.

Perkin-Elmer succeeds in quickly building the Microprojector—a formidable accomplishment for the time. The instrument can image 300 million picture elements—pixels—on a two-inch wafer, sufficient to provide the requested resolution of 2.5 microns. The Air Force is satisfied, but the alignment system makes the device shockingly expensive and Perkin-Elmer doesn’t even try to commercialize it.⁶ In addition to Perkin-Elmer, Ultratech has also built a machine for noncontact one-to-one wafer exposure. Lithographic developments like these have already permeated the American chip industry by the time Van Heek and Bouwhuis cross the Atlantic. During their trip, they discuss the Microprojector with companies such as General Electric and IBM.

8. Technical Note 105/71

Herman van Heek and Gijs Bouwhuis create the world’s first wafer stepper. Van Heek is the system architect; Bouwhuis develops the brilliant aligning principle that puts Dutch lithography on the global map in the decades that follow.

During their trip, Herman van Heek and Gijs Bouwhuis hear that Perkin-Elmer’s first attempt hasn’t made it to market. Most of the Americans they meet tell them they no longer believe in optics. They say they’ve pinned their hopes on electron beams, which enable the direct writing of extremely small details.

Van Heek and Bouwhuis nonetheless continue work on an optical reduction projector. If they succeed in directly reducing an image onto silicon, they’ll have the superior technology. All the problems with damaged contact masks will be a thing of the past. What’s more, a noncontact reduction phase will also reduce errors and dust on the mask. They’ll end up so small on the silicon that they usually won’t cause any problems—and that will boost chip yield.

Their device must also be able to position the silicon wafer down to a fraction of a micron in order to expose the next pattern with extreme accuracy. That alignment is a major problem. Some ten successive exposures must overlay precisely.

The big question is, how will the machine locate the exact right spot on the silicon wafer? It’s not an easy problem to solve: any mark or other pattern they make on the wafer will end up barely visible, thanks to all the intermediate chemical and physical processing. Add to that the fact it will be covered by a new layer of photoresist, required to expose the next pattern. Is it even possible to build a device that can project all the chip patterns, one after another, step by step, onto the wafer? And do it within a tolerance of a few tenths of a micron?

In the seventies, many major chip manufacturers are working on machines to tackle this problem. Almost all of them decide to use some kind of black-and-white feature on the wafer to determine location. But Bouwhuis comes up with a solution that’s far more robust. He already has years of experience with phase gratings, which are used in displacement measurement systems such as the carriages of Klostermann’s photorepeater.

Van Heek is also familiar with the technology. At the lab he runs a mini-factory that makes the scanning heads for devices like the photorepeater. These heads read a code composed of four-micron-wide dashes. The principle was conceived by Hendrik de Lang’s group and refined by Bouwhuis.

A phase grating looks a little like a field of asparagus, with tiny mounds that are a quarter-wavelength high (the wavelength of the light used to read the gratings). Using optical polarization and phase contrast, a sensor can read the dashes. Van Heek and Bouwhuis are quick to see how these gratings and the associated optics can solve their problem. They realize that phase gratings are capable of surviving every step of the chipmaking process.

The answer is obvious to them. If they can deposit a mini-asparagus bed onto the wafer and align the mask and everything else using a polarized laser, then in theory they’ve solved their problem. The only disadvantage of phase gratings is that the required optics are extremely complex. But they don’t hesitate for a second. They start experimenting with patterns of lines etched onto the wafer and similar patterns in the mask.

With his experience in optics, Bouwhuis knows he can demonstrate his principle in the lab, but he seriously doubts whether the technology will hold up in a demanding environment. “Here at Natlab it’s easy to build it,” he tells Van Heek. “But once the thing makes it to the fab, I’ll be worried. There’s no guarantee this kind of system will survive in those conditions.”

*   *   *

In retrospect it seems simple, but in 1971 an optical solution for patterning chips is out of sync with the times. The Americans are excited about writing with electrons—it’s slow, but it’s significantly more accurate than optical imaging. And everyone expects the throughput of electron-beam lithography to improve.

Bouwhuis doesn’t know much about electron beams, but all the glowing stories about e-beam patterning sow seeds of doubt. He seriously wonders whether it’s worth the effort to start building a complex optical device for chip production. “If things keep going this way, then e-beam will be a serious competitor and we’ll have done all this work for nothing,” he tells Van Heek.

They conclude that whatever else happens, an optical device will need to be much faster than e-beam writers. Otherwise the machine will simply be too expensive and e-beam will definitely leave them in the dust. Across the full production process, wafers will have to run through their device ten or so times. Each time, the machine will create hundreds of patterns step by step. If their process isn’t fast, they’ll stop working on it.

And so Van Heek and Bouwhuis spend months exchanging thoughts and ideas. They sit in an office just two windows wide, desks side by side, looking out at the trees. There’s just enough room for a file cabinet on each end.

Bouwhuis has a quiet, reserved personality, but he’s turned himself into a walking encyclopedia of optics. Van Heek is the free spirit. Unhindered by any knowledge of optics, he suggests the craziest things. “Gijs, what if we put a ten-to-one reduction lens and a one-to-ten magnification lens back to back, to get one-to-one?” When Bouwhuis hears that kind of silliness, he gives Van Heek a short lecture and sends him to the library, where he can bring himself up to speed.

They don’t talk to each other much. And when they do, it’s about engineering. Bouwhuis isn’t much of a talker to begin with, and he has little desire to be the center of attention. Van Heek avoids personal conversations with colleagues, mainly because he’s worried they’ll lead to disagreement, something he passionately detests.

After months of deliberation, the moment arrives. In May 1971 Bouwhuis, Van Heek, and Ad Bouwer describe in Technical Note 105/71 why they prefer to use optical step-and-repeat projection with image reduction over exposing an entire silicon wafer at one-to-one scale. After listing their deliberations, they write that they’ll need $70,000 to build a prototype machine: $45,000 for the optics and the rest for the electronics and mechanics. “The optics group at Natlab prefers a repeater to a one-to-one projection system,” the trio writes. “The crucial difference between the systems is the ability to meet future needs.”

They soon have a name. Klostermann’s photorepeater burns patterns onto glass plate negatives; Van Heek and Bouwhuis’s machine projects those patterns directly onto silicon, so they call it the Silicon Repeater 1.

Van Heek, Bouwhuis, and Bouwer propose a system that combines the principles Natlab previously developed for the photorepeater and another system, the Opthycograph (appendix 5). The movement is “stop and go,” they write. Their Silicon Repeater won’t have a flash lamp, but a thousand-watt mercury lamp. The light will strike the wafer through a mirror condenser, mask, and lens. The lamp will burn continuously; a shutter mechanism will carefully dose the flashes.

Just like Klostermann, Van Heek and Bouwhuis are outsiders at Natlab. They don’t act like researchers, but more like developers or engineers who want to solve a practical problem: namely, how to project patterns with details a few microns wide onto silicon wafers as fast as they can. Van Heek is the systems engineer and architect, Bouwhuis the optical expert.

One of the most difficult points is aligning the mask and wafer. As noted earlier, the principle of noncontact optical projection is more or less obvious, but the alignment problem is so intractable that Van Heek and Bouwhuis have spent a long time not wanting to consider it as a serious route to mass production. It’s like landing on the moon. They know it can be done, but it’ll take insane effort to make it happen. The challenges facing the device they want to make are considerable: it needs mercilessly high precision, and it also has to be reliable and quick.

For example, there are stringent criteria for the lens. To project the exposures for ten or more layers in precise overlay, the lens must be free of distortion.

But it all starts, literally and figuratively, with alignment. Before the machine fills an entire silicon wafer with patterns, it first has to know exactly where the wafer is. Then the wafer’s coordinates have to be brought into exact agreement with those of the photomask. And it has to happen to an accuracy measured in fractions of microns. That isn’t something you can do by hand; that would take far too much time.

Only then does the exposure process truly begin. Once the device knows precisely where the wafer is and knows the coordinates for every previous exposure, it must automatically expose the photoresist across the full silicon wafer. That means that before each exposure, the Silicon Repeater must position the table holding the wafer with an accuracy of a few tenths of a micron. The trick is to have the machine first discover roughly where the wafer is. They need coarse control to bring the alignment mark within range of the laser beam. Then the device has to align the marks on the wafer and the mask with extreme precision. Once it’s done that, it knows exactly where the wafer is. Then it can fill the silicon with the next round of patterns.

Van Heek and Bouwhuis spend months discussing how to implement it, down to the smallest detail. In the beginning their boss Kramer joins in; he regularly pops into his people’s offices to ask how things are going. The alignment marks aren’t the only tricky point; there’s also the optical path, the trajectory the laser must travel between the marks on the mask and the wafer. At some point one of them says they should have the positioning laser run through the projection lens: “It needs to go through that lens, not a separate one.”

In the seventies, all their competitors are using separate optical paths for projection and alignment. This approach has a number of challenges. For one, it’s vital to firmly anchor the two lenses to each other. Even then, errors always creep in. The idea to send the laser through the imaging optics is simple, but groundbreaking. Bouwhuis is the one who works it out and later authors the patent for through-the-lens alignment. The invention is one of the crown jewels that Philips will later transfer to its lithography joint venture with ASM International: ASML.

The combination of phase gratings and through-the-lens alignment is so revolutionary, so progressive and advanced, that it will keep ASML ahead of the competition for decades. Along with the linear motor—later conceived at Natlab—it forms the technological foundation for the company’s success. It’s one of the key inventions that will enable ASML to conquer the global market and grow into the major provider by far of lithographic processes for chips after 2000.

The projection system isn’t the only optical challenge facing Van Heek and Bouwhuis. The process also involves a great deal of handling and precise movements. For example, the machine must automatically place the silicon wafers onto a positioning table (the same way you slide a pizza into an oven). The stage must grip the wafers using suction and then place them under the lens with extreme accuracy. Speed is important. Van Heek and Bouwhuis know that’s the only way they can compete with electron-beam technology. A simple calculation tells them that the exposure itself takes up just a tenth of the total duration, so the place where they need to save time is in the handling and mechanics.

*   *   *

Van Heek’s sure of it: to build what he lovingly calls his machine, he needs Bouwer. At the time, Bouwer is considered by far the best mechanical engineer at Natlab, and probably in all of Philips. From his first days as a young rookie at the Philips company school, he’s fought for his place as the firm’s top designer. He’s an inventive man who knows better than anyone how to solve mechanical problems and how to translate engineers’ needs into a finished product. Nijmegen, Hamburg, Caen: everywhere they have one of Natlab’s photorepeaters, they gush about Bouwer’s craftsmanship.

Part of the Silicon Repeater 1’s pneumatic system. Many of the device’s features, even moving the wafer table into horizontal position, were effected using compressed air.

Van Heek encounters a self-confident man who, at six-feet-four, is at least as tall as he is. Bouwer’s superstar status allows him to be choosy. He hasn’t always enjoyed previous collaborations, and when Van Heek knocks on his door, the designer spells out his requirements. “Listen,” he says once he’s heard Van Heek’s speech. “If you want me to make it happen, then we’ll do it my way. I don’t want you to meddle with the wafer handling; you just stick to the optics.” Van Heek isn’t one for confrontation; besides, he wants the best designer to build his machine. He instantly agrees to Bouwer’s conditions.

Bouwer wants to use compressed air for much of the machine’s movement, a choice that isn’t obvious. Van Heek’s colleagues pepper him with uninvited counsel. “What do you mean, compressed air? You need to solve that with electronics!” But Van Heek stands squarely behind Bouwer. Natlab has an electronics design group, but it’s a tiny, raucous, headstrong bunch. Van Heek has also considered whether Elcoma’s electronic engineers in Nijmegen could do it, but he doesn’t think he understands electronics well enough to guide development from afar.

*   *   *

So the partnership with Bouwer is practical. Van Heek wants to build a working prototype quickly, and the designer can deliver fast; he has a large number of standard components he can choose from to build the pneumatic controls, and that gets the project off to a running start.

There are other arguments for using compressed air. In the early seventies, Natlab is actively researching pneumatics. It’s the glory days for Philips’ factories, which can’t produce color televisions fast enough, and using compressed gas for control shows great promise for automating production. Bouwer has a good relationship with Natlab’s pneumatics group, and for them the Silicon Repeater is the ideal opportunity to demonstrate the advantages of compressed air. They promise to give him all the help he needs if he uses their technology.

And that’s why the first Silicon Repeater’s wafer handling system isn’t made of electronic and electromagnetic components, but chiefly of pneumatic ones: a control system made of air valves and hoses to do all kinds of things, from grasping to positioning, clamping, releasing, and transporting.

Gerard Antonis at the lathe where components for the Silicon Repeater 1 were made. Antonis was Ad Bouwer’s most talented instrument maker. Among other things, he was tasked with making the custom bearings to horizontally position the wafer table.

9. The Silicon Repeater

A wafer stepper is a license to print money, and the engineer tasked with building one isn’t going to worry about the cost.

Natlab isn’t capable of making advanced optics, but for everything else the research stronghold is a technological cornucopia. Researchers have access to top scientists in every technical discipline, as well as to the best glass blowers, machinists, instrument makers, and other craftsmen. The engineering crème de la crème stands ready in well-equipped workrooms to help build the wildest setups.

In theory, at least. In practice, not everyone is leaping to help. Herman van Heek discovers that fact during his attempts to have Natlab produce the control electronics for his wafer stepper. The electronics researchers are less than enthusiastic. The eggheads don’t want to get their hands dirty. They prefer to concentrate on fundamental semiconductor research. They turn up their noses at something as banal as a machine control system, because that means drafting specifications and making printed circuit boards. A scientist can’t make a name for himself doing that.

When Van Heek knocks on the door of the lab’s electrical shop, they aren’t interested in the job, either. The boss sniffs at the project; his assistants are already occupied, and he doesn’t think much of Van Heek’s proposal for the electronics design.

Van Heek doesn’t let that discourage him. He’s having a great time with his project, because he has full control over every decision. The solution for the machine’s control system is soon found, at Elcoma. Just as for Klostermann’s photorepeater, the electronic mechanization group in Nijmegen is happy to help. Natlab’s directors discuss it directly with Elcoma’s management. In exchange for a few Silicon Repeaters, Elcoma will build the control system, a six-feet-high rack filled with electronics. They’re happy to take charge of future maintenance on it, too.

*   *   *

There’s a good reason why Elcoma’s electronic mechanization team is so eager to work on the Silicon Repeater. In chip manufacture, power is shifting from the people who make the machines to the people who design the production process—a new phenomenon inside Philips.

In the early seventies, Philips is still highly hierarchical. In the industrial divisions, the mechanization team is in charge of production resources. They develop the machines and equip the factories. Not-invented-here syndrome is strong. So Philips makes its own light bulb assembly carousels, its own glass-blowing machines for cathode ray tubes, its own fluorescent light assembly lines hundreds of yards long, and its own pick-and-place machines for mounting electronic components onto printed circuit boards.

But in the chip factories, the process engineers are chipping away at the dominance of the technical support teams and the machine designers. The balance of power is shifting. In the wafer fabs, it’s no longer the machine designers who determine yields, but the guys with their hands on the controls. They know how dozens of processing steps affect one another, how to use the available machines to achieve a high yield. Complexity is growing in chip fabrication, and all the steps have to be perfectly attuned: applying photoresist, exposing, developing, etching, oxidizing, evaporating.

At Elcoma, too, power is shifting from the mechanization team to the engineers who set up the production process. More and more often, the process engineers are using specialized machines built elsewhere. And they’re pleased with the results. When they buy outside of Philips, they also get customer-friendly service to boot. They’re no longer dependent on surly colleagues, Philips’ bureaucracy, or Natlab’s arrogant researchers.

But in the early seventies, Elcoma’s mechanization group is still a fount of cutting-edge expertise. They’re using computers, writing software, and developing custom electronics. When they get Van Heek’s request from Natlab to develop the control electronics for an entirely new lithography machine, they seize the opportunity. It’s a way to put themselves back in center stage.

After the deal, Elcoma even stations an engineer in Van Heek’s project group at Natlab. He’ll make the electronics that coordinate movement in the stepper, process the displacement signals from the measuring heads, control the pneumatics, and manage simpler things like switching the lights on the control panel on and off. The engineer has the support of his own group back in Nijmegen, which develops the electronics and makes the printed circuit boards. They also write the software there.

When Van Heek sends his quarterly report to his boss, Kramer, and Natlab’s management on September 22, 1971, he keeps it short and sweet. He clearly describes the partnership of equals between Elcoma and Natlab:

In January, Bouwhuis and I visited the United States of America to present the opthycograph to a wider audience. During this trip we had the opportunity to explore how people in other laboratories are tackling the problems associated with projection onto the Si wafer.

These new impressions gave rise to a proposal to solve the projection problem using a repeater that prints onto silicon. This approach has met with such agreement in Santen’s group at Natlab and at Elcoma in Nijmegen that a joint Natlab–Elcoma project has been formed, to fabricate two identical silicon repeaters. Elcoma will provide the electronics and information processing, Natlab the optics, mechanics, and project coordination. The general ideas have already been worked out in great detail.