Design for electron beam: A novel approach to electron beam direct writing throughput enhancement for volume production

The ordinal shot count reduction in the character projection based electron beam (EB) maskless lithography is done by the recognition of the repeatability of physical design data. Nevertheless, the reduction efficiency is limited to around four times. The new concept of design for electron beam enables a much higher shot count reduction rate of more than ten times and enables a drastic throughput enhancement. Using this method, the authors created an EB friendly design layout data by tracing back to upstream design flow and this is the most characteristic feature of this methodology.