Henry I. Smith: The 2025 SPIE Frits Zernike Award for Microlithography

Henry Smith, commonly known to colleagues as Hank, is a professor emeritus at MIT, where he sits on the Advisory Committee of the International Conference on Electron, Ion, and Photon Beam Technology and Nanofabrication and serves as the faculty mentor for the Women’s Varsity Tennis Team. Smith has taught at MIT since 1980 and was the founding director of its NanoStructures Laboratory. From 1990 to 2005, he held the Institute’s Joseph F. and Nancy P. Keithley Chair in Electrical Engineering. Previously, from 1968-1980, he was at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, working on surface-acoustic-wave devices, where he pioneered the development of nanofabrication techniques and founded the lab’s Submicrometer Technology Group. And, following a master’s degree from Boston College, Smith held a research position at the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratory in partial fulfilment of his ROTC requirement. (He served as an officer in the US Air Force from 1960-1963).

But that’s just a high-level view of truly innovative achievements: during a career that has spanned 50 years, Smith and his colleagues have been responsible for many innovations in nanoscale science and engineering, across an extensive range of areas. These include conformable-photomask lithography, X-ray lithography, the phase-shift mask, the attenuating phase shifter, spatial-phase-locked e‑beam lithography, achromatic-interference lithography, coherent-diffraction lithography, immersion photolithography, zone-plate-array lithography, absorbance-modulation optical lithography, interferometric mask alignment, graphoepitaxy, directed self-assembly, nanomembrane assembly, and a variety of quantum-effect, short-channel, single-electron, nanomagnetic, photonic-crystal, and microphotonic devices.

An awardee of the SPIE BACUS Prize in 2003, Smith is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, IEEE, the National Academy of Inventors, and the International Society for Nanomanufacturing. He is a recipient of the IEEE Robert N. Noyce Medal, the IEEE Cledo Brunetti Award, the Nano 50 Award from Tech Briefs, and an honorary Doctor of Science from Holy Cross College. Smith holds more than 40 US patents and has published over 400 technical articles. He has also been an educator and mentor to generations of students, postdocs, and visiting researchers, infusing them with his robust ethic of combining scientific rigor and creativity.

“Hank is well known for his many outstanding contributions to lithography during his 40-plus years as a professor at MIT,” says SPIE Fellow and recipient of the 2009 Frits Zernike Award Chris Mack. “While he is universally known for his work on proximity X-ray lithography, he is also an inventor of phase-shifting masks and has pursued many interesting approaches toward pushing what is possible in lithographic resolution, including new approaches to interference lithography, zone-plate lithography, and absorbance modulation. His second important legacy is his students. Over his expansive career he has trained many exceptional students in the intricacies of nanolithography, and many of those students have gone on to make their own important contributions to the field of semiconductor lithography. Hank’s attitude of the fearless pursuit of the truth is evident whenever he is in the audience for a lithography talk, where his questions are sometimes both dreaded and appreciated simultaneously.”

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Read more about Henry I. Smith and the SPIE Frits Zernike Award for Microlithography.