Hua-Yu Liu, Clive Wu & Xiaoyang Li, Numerical Technologies Inc., San Jose, CA, USA

Lithography has been the technological driver for shrinking circuits and creating finer and finer transistor gates. As silicon feature sizes continue to decrease below the wavelength of available exposure tools, reticle-based resolution enhancement techniques including optical proximity correction (OPC) and phase-shifting mask (PSM) are required for patterning features that are significantly smaller than wavelength. Infrastructure, such as software tools and mask making capability, has to be developed in order to use such technologies in production.