Scanning Laser Lithography With Constrained Quadratic Exposure Optimization

Scanning laser lithography is a maskless lithography method for selectively exposing features on a film of photoresist. A set of exposure positions and beam energies are required to optimally reproduce the desired feature pattern. The task of determining the exposure energies is inherently nonlinear due to the photoresist model and the requirement for only positive energy. In this brief, a nonlinear programming approach is employed to find an optimal exposure profile that minimizes the feature error and total exposure energy. This method is demonstrated experimentally to create a feature with subwavelength geometry.

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