Scanning Laser Technology Applied to High Speed Reticle Writing

For the past several years, the method for fabricating the majority of the high quality reticles required to manufacture today's complex circuits has been a-beam lithography. Most of the e-beam lithography systems used for this task are based on the raster scan technology developed at AT&T Bell Labs about twenty years ago to make 1X masks. The designs of these systems have evolved over time and their capabilities have been expanded to include reticle writing, but their basic architecture has remained unchanged which imposes significant limitations on their throughput when writing complex reticles. This paper will describe a high precision, high performance optical lithography system based on scanning laser technology and optimized for the high speed writing of 5X and 10X reticles. Examples of its writing quality will be shown.