The Nick Cobb Memorial Scholarship, which will support the education of a graduate student working in a field related to advanced lithography, was announced at the 2018 SPIE Advanced Lithography symposium
BELLINGHAM, Washington, USA and CARDIFF, UK - On 26 February, at the 2018 SPIE Advanced Lithography's plenary event, symposium chair Bruce Smith announced the creation of the Nick Cobb Memorial Scholarship. The new scholarship, jointly established and funded by SPIE and Mentor Graphics, honors the memory of SPIE Senior Member and Mentor Graphics Chief Engineer Nick Cobb who passed away last year. It also recognizes his groundbreaking contributions enabling optical and process proximity correction for IC manufacturing.
"Mentor Graphics is pleased to collaborate with SPIE to initiate the Nick Cobb Memorial Scholarship which will assist graduate students in the field of microlithography," says Mentor Graphics' Director of Product Development John Sturtevant. "Nick was one of the founding fathers of Optical Proximity Correction (OPC); his seminal papers in 1994-1996 laid the foundation for the now industry-standard method of performing fast, accurate, full-chip simulations. While finishing his Ph.D. at Berkeley, he founded Singamask with Professor Avideh Zakhor, and in 1998 Mentor Graphics acquired this startup. Nick worked at Mentor Graphics for nearly 20 years, and his tireless efforts helped multiple companies through several technology nodes. We very much wanted to do something to celebrate Nick's substantial contributions, and we were pleased to have Nick's family members there at the symposium opening session. We look forward to partnering with SPIE for years to come in furthering education in this vital discipline."
Cobb was active at multiple SPIE conferences, authoring or co-authoring and presenting more than 40 papers, including those seminal works mentioned by Dr. Sturtevant. SPIE is honored to partner with Mentor Graphics to recognize Nick Cobb's life and contributions as well as supporting young researchers in the lithography community in Nick's name.
The first scholarship of US$ 10,000 will be awarded in 2019 to an outstanding graduate student studying advanced lithography, or working in a related field. Acknowledging the importance of early-career research, the key criterion in evaluating applications will be the student's potential long-term contribution to advanced lithography or related fields. In addition, Mentor Graphics will provide the winner with travel support to the 2019 SPIE Advanced Lithography conference.
The application deadline for the inaugural Nick Cobb Memorial Scholarship is 21 September, 2018.
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