A Flexible Stamping Algorithm for E-Beam Projection Technology with the Designed Characters
Date Issued
2015
Date
2015
Author(s)
Wu, Chia-Hsien
Abstract
In recent decades, electron-beam lithography (EBL) is one of the strong candidates to draw custom shapes on the surface of wafer covered with electron-sensitive film called resist. The primary advantage of EBL is that it can draw custom patterns in sub-10nm resolution since the electron beam can change the solubility of the resist. Nevertheless, the low throughput of EBL is limiting its capability to mass production. Variable Shaped Beam (VSB), one of the EBL technologies, exploits a set of variant rectangles to construct the layout. As the VLSI circuit design getting larger and more complicated, it takes more numbers of shots of VSB to realize modern design layouts. Thus, the bottleneck which limits the application of EBL system is the manufacturing feasibility. One approach to improve the throughput of VSB is the Character Projection (CP) techniques which constructs the layout with pre-designed characters for reducing the number of shots. In this thesis, we will introduce a series of methods, including character design, layout normalization and layout matching for improving the throughput of Character Projection (CP) Electron-Beam Lithography. According to the experimental results, our throughput is 2.1 times faster than the previously published algorithm. Besides, we set more conditions to ensure the circuit function unchanged.
Subjects
Lithography
Electron Beam
Cell Projection
Character Projection
Variable Shaped Beam Technology
Type
thesis