【6/22/2021 】CAPA-NoVA Distinguished Chinese American Project
(Author: Yuyan Zhou)
林本堅(Burn-Jeng Lin) （born 1942) is a Taiwanese engineer. While working for IBM, Lin became the first to propose immersion lithography, a technique that became viable in the 1980s. Lin left IBM to found his own company, Linnovation, Inc., in 1992. He began working for TSMC in 2000. Lin was named an IEEE Fellow in 2003, and granted an equivalent honor by the SPIE. The next year, SPIE gave Lin the inaugural Frits Zernike Award. In 2008, Lin was elected to membership of the United States National Academy of Engineering “For technical innovations and leadership in the development of lithography for semiconductor manufacturing.” Lin received the IEEE Cledo Brunetti Award and IEEE Jun-ichi Nishizawa Medal in 2009 and 2013 respectively. In 2014, Lin was named a member of Academia Sinica. Upon his retirement from TSMC, he was offered a position on the faculty of National Tsing Hua University.
Burn J. Lin is recognized as a technical leader in the semiconductor manufacturing industry and most responsible for 193-nm immersion lithography. In 2002, Dr. Lin proposed immersion lithography, which is a resolution-enhancement process that replaces the air gap between the lens and the wafer surface with a liquid medium, such as purified water. Through Dr. Lin’s perseverance in convincing the industry that a change was needed, immersion lithography was adopted, and manufacturing of 45-nm feature sizes and smaller have become possible.
He has continued the cause for immersion lithography with groundbreaking papers that have mapped out scaling laws for super-high numerical aperture immersion optics, and he has led the development of defect-reduction methods to address concerns regarding the technology. As a result, immersion lithography has quickly become a manufacturing technology in just a few years.
Dr. Lin is an IEEE Life Fellow and 2013 winner of the IEEE Jun-ichi Nishizawa Medal for “contributions to lithographic manufacturing, including immersion lithography.” He is currently the senior director of the Nanopatterning Technology Division at TSMC, Ltd., the world’s largest silicon foundry.
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