A high-speed exposure method for digital micromirror device based scanning maskless lithography system

Abstract During the process of scanning maskless lithography, exposure speed determines the efficiency and productivity of lithography fabrication. In this paper, a novel Digital Micromirror Device(DMD) based high-speed exposure method is proposed to optimize the exposure process and improve speed of scanning maskless lithography system. At first, structure and working principle of the DMD based maskless exposure system is presented. Then, fundamental principle of the proposed method is proposed. Exposure process of the proposed method and each module in the process including in scan stride pretreatment module, scan stride data storage module, high-speed real-time exposure image processing module and micromirror arrays control module are designed. Finally, the proposed method is implemented in the exposure experiment with TI DMD based scanning maskless lithography system and the results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method.