Row-structure stencil planning approaches for E-beam lithography with overlapped characters

• Solutions to significantly improve the throughput of E-beam lithography.
• Experiments show remarkable improvement of quality comparing with previous works.
• Our methods are orders of magnitude faster than existing approaches.

Character projection is a key technology to enhance throughput of E-beam lithography, in which characters need to be selected and placed on the stencil. This paper solves the problem of planning for row-structure stencil with overlapped characters and also considers multi-column cell system for further throughput improvement. We first propose an approach that is designed for characters with “regular” left and right blank spaces, which is an integrated framework to solve the subproblems of character selection, row distribution, single-row ordering and post-refinement efficiently. We then present another approach that can optimize stencil planning with general characters. Experiments show that both approaches remarkably outperform the existing methods on different sets of benchmarks. We can achieve significant throughput improvement and remarkable speed-up comparing with previous works.