Data processing system in electron beam direct writing to obtain photolithography friendly resist patterns

Faster development of products is being increasingly demanded by the growing diversification of the electronics market. Quickly producing small lots of prototype chips is increasingly required for system LSIs made using leading-edge semiconductor process technologies, in order to test their functions and performance in actual products. In view of these trends, maskless lithography can create a development environment to enable cheaper costs and shorter periods. In mass production, however, lithography using photo-masks is used because of high productivity. Using an exposure technology different from mass production causes different physical phenomenon in the lithography process, and it forms different images. In this paper, we describe a data processing method for making each printed image correspond between lithographic printing systems which are electron beam lithography and photolithography of a different exposure source. The method has features which are to distinguish differences in the contour data obtained from each lithography simulation, to modify design data based on the difference information, and to register the design data in a design data library for electron beam exposure. Moreover, we demonstrated that our data processing system was able to make the electron beam exposure data obtain the same shape as the shape of resist patterns by photolithography. We report on the data processing system because we have finished a basic examination of our data processing method.