I attended ICFO from 2009 to 2016 in the Attoscience and Ultrafast Optics group of Prof. Dr. Jens Biegert. My path to ICFO was a bit atypical as I was coming from a non-scientific, industrial environment (IT in the legal industry). Upon successful completion of my PhD I moved to Boulder, Colorado, USA for a postdoc in what was essentially a continuation of my PhD work.

The Boulder group had spun out a laser company in the 1990s and it was always my desire to get back into industry, so in 2017 I joined KM Labs as a research scientist. In 2020 I did return to a quasi-academic environment for a 2-year break from short-wavelength light, but returned to the “field” in 2022.

During my time in Boulder, both in academia and industry, a strong skills overlap became apparent with the bleeding edge of semiconductor manufacturing and that is the use of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light used to manufacture few-nm scale microchips. This realization really opened the door to many great opportunities and ultimately to my current role as Director of EUV Source Development at EUV Tech, where we manufacture EUV metrology tools for the semiconductor industry.

EUV Tech uses a multitude of EUV light sources to power our metrology tools, but all of them are laser driven as is the $200M+ wafer scanner at the heart of the EUV lithography industry. I’ll give an outline of why EUV is the wavelength range of choice for the semiconductor industry and what is needed to stay on top of the metrology demands to ensure high volume manufacturing throughput.