Data preparation for digital scanner

Nikon has been developing the Digital Scanner (DS), an optical maskless exposure tool with a DUV light source and a micromirror-type spatial light modulator (SLM). Rasterized digital data, essentially huge bitmap files, are used to drive the SLM. The DS enables new applications such as large area printing and chip customization because its digital pattern data are easily modified. Flexible and fast data preparation software was developed for the new applications. As a standard operation of DS data preparation software, a CAD file (GDS or OASIS) is converted into bitmap files. In addition, bitmap file generation by a scripting language is available without a CAD file. This is useful when the CAD file includes a lot of polygons in which each polygon is similar but not identical, resulting in a huge file. As an example of application, a metasurface consists of sub-wavelength periodic patterns with various shapes, which are arranged to achieve the desired optical effect. The shape of each pattern at a grid point can be determined by a computer program, i.e., a pattern generator script. On the other hand, data preparation time can be shortened for periodic pattern which is often seen in semiconductor circuits. We report those data preparation methods for the DS, which have been used for our recent exposure experiments.