Simultaneously, the same need for linearity correction, printability enhancement, and resilience to manufacturing variation has caused much innovation in offline mask data preparation and mask process correction. Typically, the writer performs inline correction for backscatter, fogging, loading, charging and thermal effects, but leaves <10μm effects to offline correction.
With multi-beam writers, the write time is independent of shape count. Any set of input shapes is rasterized to a set of arrays of equal sized pixels that are each independently dosed to write the desired shapes. Multi-beam writers also have a certain minimum write time that is required for writing even a very small number of simple shapes. This gives rise to the possibility of providing linearity correction features, even for the short-range effects as inline correction in the writer. Such inline correction has zero impact on throughput and turnaround time of mask making.
This paper introduces the GPU-accelerated inline linearity correction capability of the NuFlare MBM-1000 for the first time.
