In the final section of their work Empire, Hardt and Negri discuss the coming into being of the multitude, the unified force that overthrows the system of ‘Empire’. Absent from the account of this unification of the multitude is the influence of religion. I endeavor to show that contrary to Hardt’s and Negri’s assumption, religion is not dissipating among the multitude and that its impact will be contrary to the creation of a unified multitude. Thus the creation of the unified multitude requires an absence of religion, but the creation of the multitude under the system of Empire entails a creation of more theists, leading to a seeming contradiction in the process of creating a unified multitude. In order for the creation of the multitude envisioned by Hardt and Negri to be complete, the issue of religion must be addressed, it cannot simply be assumed away as unimportant or non-existent.

CMP non-uniformity has been an increasingly critical issue that needs to be addressed as memory device geometries continue to shrink. This issue is more prominent for ILD oxide CMP due to its poor controllability as compared to other CMP processes that can rely on stopping layers for effective endpoint detections and non-uniformity control. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to address the ILD oxide CMP non-uniformity issue by introducing a dual film polish concept. Experimental results show that this approach improves wafer non-uniformity and reduces scratches. Final device probe yield suggests that the approach is valid. A rate model is also proposed to elucidate the dual film CMP process.