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In electron-beam (e-beam) and optical lithography, blurring (or proximity effect) in a written pattern would become more severe as the critical dimension of a circuit is reduced down to 0.1 um and below. Therefore, correction of proximity effect will be inevitable in order to write such a high-density circuit using e-beam or optical lithography. Two main issues in proximity effect correction are accuracy and speed.

A proximity effect correction scheme, named PYRAMID, is being developed for e-beam lithography. PYRAMID has been shown to successfully correct circuits with the critical dimension of 0.1 um for various substrates. PYRAMID takes a hierarchical approach for generality and accuracy, employs rule tables for fast correction, produces regular outputs, and does not require human interaction. Also, the current version uses shape modification only with a single dose for the entire circuit, and therefore it is compatible with not only conventional e-beam systems (gaussian or shaped beam) but also massively parallel e-beam machines and projection-based architectures. It has a high potential to be an efficient scheme also for optical proximity correction.

TECHNICAL INFORMATION

• Shape Correction
• Dose Correction
• Heterogeneous Correction
• Grayscale Lithography
• Non-Rectangular Features

DOCUMENTS

• Journal Papers on PYRAMID
  (Recent Papers in PDF)
• Dissertations and Theses