The Micronic Omega6500, a new high performance scanned laser mask lithography system, has been installed in a production mask facility of DuPont Photomasks, Inc. (DPI) The Omega6500 is a 5-beam system with an exposure wavelength of 413 nm, acousto-optic modulation beam intensity control and acousto-optic deflection. The use of a fast expandable datapath architecture along with a hierarchical data format allows extremely dense files to be printed at the full area coverage rate. Due to the differences between this tool and existing tools within DPI, and since this tool is completely new to the photomask industry, a cooperative project was initiated between DPI and Micronic to characterize the performance of the Omega6500 in a mask production environment. In specific we examined the optimization of the resist process, evaluated data handling capability and procedures, and determined changes required to job planning and manufacturing flow. Performance test procedures were created and used to evaluate the precision performance of the system. A production emulation plate suite was used to characterize pattern integrity and precision on real masks. Keywords: scanned laser lithography, photomask

Date Published: 22 January 2001
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 4186, 20th Annual BACUS Symposium on Photomask Technology, (22 January 2001); doi: 10.1117/12.410726

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 4186:
20th Annual BACUS Symposium on Photomask Technology
Brian J. Grenon; Giang T. Dao, Editor(s)