SPIE Senior Member Harry Sewell, 68, a retired director of technology at ASML (US) who worked to extend lithography technology to higher and higher resolution capacity, died 26 January.
The holder of 57 patents and author of numerous research papers presented at international conferences, including SPIE Advanced Lithography, Sewell worked for some 30 years in the semiconductor industry, most recently as a science and technology business consultant.
After receiving his PhD from Imperial College London, he went to work at Philips Researchs Lab in the UK where he was responsible for developing electron-beam lithography. In 1979, he joined Bell Northern Research in Ottawa, Canada, and in 1982 moved to the US to manage lithographic applications for Perkin Elmer Corp., now ASML, where he retired in 2009.
As ASML director of technology, he managed a team of engineers and was responsible for extending the lithography technology beyond the 193nm mode using high-n immersion fluid technology.
Louis Markoya, an ASML colleague who worked with him for 20 years, said Sewell earned the nickname of ‘One-more-data-point Harry' for his meticulous work. "When the complex problems of wafer-chip processing looked their worst, Harry was always called in to find the fixes," Markoya said.
In an obituary for the Ridgefield (Connecticut) Press, his wife Lynne wrote that Sewell "did his best to ignore the symptoms of his cancer and the side effects of chemotherapy for more than two years because he had so much to do — so many projects, trips to take and new recipes to try.
"Only during his last months did he concede to fatigue, but he still talked of the seeds he would plant in the spring."
More in his obituary
