Datapath system for multiple electron beam lithography systems using image compression

Abstract

The datapath throughput of electron beam lithography systems can be improved by applying lossless image compression to the layout images and using an electron beam writer that contains a decoding circuit packed in single silicon to decode the compressed image on-the-fly. In our past research, we had introduced Corner2, a lossless layout image compression algorithm that achieved significantly better performance in compression ratio, encoding/decoding speed, and decoder memory requirement than Block C4. However, it assumed a somewhat different writing strategy from those currently suggested by multiple electron beam (MEB) system designers. The Corner2 algorithm is modified so that it can support the writing strategy of an MEB system.