University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

An Algorithm for Stencil Planning in E-Beam Lithography

Guo, Daifeng

This item is only available for download by members of the University of Illinois community. Students, faculty, and staff at the U of I may log in with your NetID and password to view the item. If you are trying to access an Illinois-restricted dissertation or thesis, you can request a copy through your library's Inter-Library Loan office or purchase a copy directly from ProQuest.

Permalink

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/46488

Description

Title
An Algorithm for Stencil Planning in E-Beam Lithography
Author(s)
Guo, Daifeng
Contributor(s)
Wong, Martin D.F.
Issue Date
2012-05
Keyword(s)
  • lithography
  • nanolithography
  • electron beam lithography
  • circuit design
  • circuit fabrication
  • stencil planning
Abstract
Electronic Beam Lithography (EBL) is an emerging nanolithography technology which directly writes the circuit pattern into wafer by e-beam. As an improved EBL technology, character projection (CP) has shorter manufacturing time, because it can complete a complex pattern with one electron shot by placing a stencil with pre-designed characters. On the other hand, the number of predesigned characters is limited by the area constraint of the stencil. In order to reduce the time of manufacture, it is desirable that more characters can be placed in the stencil such that fewer patterns would be written by conventional EBL. Because some blanking area around each character can be shared, we are able to arrange the characters in different orders, providing us with opportunities to reduce the total area occupied by a certain number of characters. In other words, there is an optimization problem: finding an optimal character order with smallest area given a certain blanking area and total stencil area. Previous work has shown that this problem is NP-hard, which means that it is highly unlikely to be solved by an algorithm with polynomial computational complexity. On the other hand, due to the complexity of the design, algorithms have to be executable in polynomial time. In this thesis, we focus on the one-dimensional order of characters which are basically standard cells, and give an algorithm to solve the optimal arrangement in polynomial time.
Type of Resource
text
Language
en
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/46488

Owning Collections

Senior Theses - Electrical and Computer Engineering PRIMARY
The best of ECE undergraduate research