2025 winner of Nick Cobb Memorial Scholarship named as Clay Klein

16 Jan 2025

Lithography-focused award honors the memory of the SPIE Senior Member and Mentor chief engineer.

Nick Cobb Memorial Scholarship winner: Clay Klein, in his lab at JILA.

Clay Klein has been announced as the 2025 recipient of the $10,000 Nick Cobb Memorial Scholarship by SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, and Siemens EDA — formally Mentor, a Siemens company — for potential contributions to advanced lithography or a related field. Klein will also be honored during 2025’s SPIE Advanced Lithography + Patterning conference, taking place in San Jose, California, between 23 - 27 February 2025.

The annual Nick Cobb scholarship recognizes an exemplary graduate student working in the field of lithography for semiconductor manufacturing. The award honors the memory of Nick Cobb, who was an SPIE Senior Member and chief engineer at Mentor.His groundbreaking contributions enabled optical and process proximity correction for integrated circuit manufacturing. Originally funded for three years for the period ending in 2021, the Nick Cobb Memorial Scholarship partnership has been extended and is now scheduled to be awarded through 2027.

Suitable for industrial-lithographic process control

Klein, a first-generation college student, is pursuing a PhD in physics at JILA and the University of Colorado, Boulder (CU). His doctoral research, under the guidance of Margaret Murnane and Henry Kapteyn, applies the unique experimental capabilities available at JILA and focuses on making EUV scatterometry fast, accurate, reliable, and suitable for industrial-lithographic process control.

His interest in the field of advanced lithography grew directly from his experience working on several research projects in the Kapteyn-Murnane group at CU. Part of his work with the group has included developing extreme ultraviolet light sources based on high harmonic generation, and using them to measure the structure and function of nanostructured materials. As part of his doctoral work, he is currently collaborating with NIST, Samsung, and 3M on unique applications of HHG-based EUV metrology.

Klein received his BS in physics with a minor in mathematics, from Clarion University, Pennsylvania, in 2022. “I am honored to be awarded the Nick Cobb Memorial Scholarship,” said Klein. “Extreme ultraviolet lithography is a critical area of research for advancing semiconductor technologies, and the associated metrology challenges present interesting and important research opportunities. This scholarship provides me with the exciting opportunity to share my research in this field and connect with others in the industry at the SPIE conference in February.”

“We are pleased to once again collaborate with SPIE to award the seventh annual Nick Cobb Memorial Scholarship to Mr. Clay Klein,” says Vice President of Siemens EDA’s Calibre Manufacturing Solutions YuYang Sun. “The scholarship honors Nick’s pioneering work in the field of lithography and his significant contributions as the chief architect of Siemens Calibre OPC solutions. It is particularly noteworthy that Clay is pursuing his PhD at the same school where Nick completed his undergraduate education, the University of Colorado at Boulder.”