Grant Willson wins Japan Prize for chemically amplified resists

SPIE Fellow C. Grant Willson (University of Texas at Austin) has been awarded the Japan Prize for his development of a process that is now used to manufacture nearly all of the microprocessors and memory chips in the world.

Willson shares the prize with Jean M. J. Fréchet with whom he first conceived of chemically amplifed resists, the materials for which they are being recognized, in 1979, said the UT press release. Willson was a researcher at IBM Corp., and Fréchet was spending a year with the company while on sabbatical from the University of Ottawa.

Similar to the Nobel Prize, the Japan Prize is an international award presented annually in Tokyo with the emperor of Japan in attendance. Willson and Fréchet will share the prize of 50 million yen (approximately $560,000 in U.S. dollars).

Read the complete UT press release.

Above, Willson presents a plenary talk on "High-resolution patterning: a few of the future," at SPIE Advanced Lithography 2012. View the talk and slides on the SPIE Newsroom (37:14).