PAL
Petersen Advanced Lithography, Inc. was founded in 1998 and incorporated in 2000. PAL is dedicated to supporting companies as they move from conventional optical lithography to using optical enhancement techniques to image sub-wavelength feature sizes. The company is located in Austin, Texas.

John S. Petersen
John S. Petersen is President and Microlithography Fellow of Petersen Advanced Lithography, Inc. John has been doing advanced semiconductor imaging since 1980 and is recognized as an industry leader in the field of optical lithography.

Prior to forming PAL, John was a Fellow at International Sematech where he led project DELPHI. DELPHI provided an assessment for using advanced optical techniques for 150 nm and smaller imaging in production. It is during this time that John formalized the concept of Image Process Integration (IPI), which is the process of optimizing, in a complementary fashion, all aspects of the microlithography imaging process, from layout through pattern transfer.

John has also been fundamental in the development of advanced chemically amplified resist models that combine reaction and diffusion rate models into a single entity. The Byers-Petersen model is now used in PROLITH/2 and PROLITH/3D from FINLE Technologies, a division of KLA-Tencor.

John has studied the interrelationship of physics and chemistry for the microlithography imaging process in both production and research environments. Working first at Texas Instruments, then later at Shipley, he spent over thirteen years starting a number of various applications, product testing, field service and product development groups in the United States and in Japan. After a five-year assignment to SEMATECH, where he was involved in deep UV resist lithography testing and process development, he left Shipley and joined International SEMATECH. He was elected Fellow in 1997.
John holds a Bachelor of Science Degree in Chemistry from Adams State College, Alamosa, Colorado. He did his graduate work in physical inorganic chemistry at Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. An internationally acclaimed leader in the field of microlithography, John has published more than forty papers and taught classes for both SEMI and SPIE.