A Modified 3D fast marching simulation for thick photoresists lithography

Fast marching methods (FMM) can solve many problems on tracking and capturing moving interface, even some sharp corners and topology changes are being developed. As the well performance in dealing with evolving surface, the FMM has been improved and introduced into three-dimensional (3D) lithography simulation of thick photoresists such as SU-8 photoresist. A stationary level set formulation of lithography simulation has been established, and solved at an extremely fast speed. A hash table has been applied to reduce the storage memory of the algorithm by 23% at least without any precision loss. As a result, the 3D lithography simulation of thick SU-8 has been successfully implemented and the obtained results indicate that the modified fast marching method can be used as an effective tool to accelerate the thick photoresists lithography simulations.

[1]  Mark Allen Weiss,et al.  Data structures and algorithm analysis in C , 1991 .

[2]  J. Sethian,et al.  Fronts propagating with curvature-dependent speed: algorithms based on Hamilton-Jacobi formulations , 1988 .

[3]  J A Sethian,et al.  A fast marching level set method for monotonically advancing fronts. , 1996, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[4]  S. Osher,et al.  Algorithms Based on Hamilton-Jacobi Formulations , 1988 .

[5]  Wei Lu,et al.  A novel 2D dynamic cellular automata model for photoresist etching process simulation , 2005 .

[6]  James A. Sethian,et al.  Fast-marching level-set methods for three-dimensional photolithography development , 1996, Advanced Lithography.

[7]  J. Sethian,et al.  A level set approach to a unified model for etching, deposition, and lithography II: three-dimensional simulations , 1995 .

[8]  Wei Lu,et al.  A novel 2D dynamic cellular automata model for photoresist etching process simulation , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems.

[9]  Guillermo Sapiro,et al.  O(N) implementation of the fast marching algorithm , 2006, Journal of Computational Physics.

[10]  E. Rouy,et al.  A viscosity solutions approach to shape-from-shading , 1992 .

[11]  Aly A. Farag,et al.  MultiStencils Fast Marching Methods: A Highly Accurate Solution to the Eikonal Equation on Cartesian Domains , 2007, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.