Fast marching methods (FMM) can solve many problems on tracking and capturing moving interface, even some sharp corners and topology changes are being developed. As the well performance in dealing with evolving surface, the FMM has been improved and introduced into three-dimensional (3D) lithography simulation of thick photoresists such as SU-8 photoresist. A stationary level set formulation of lithography simulation has been established, and solved at an extremely fast speed. A hash table has been applied to reduce the storage memory of the algorithm by 23% at least without any precision loss. As a result, the 3D lithography simulation of thick SU-8 has been successfully implemented and the obtained results indicate that the modified fast marching method can be used as an effective tool to accelerate the thick photoresists lithography simulations.
This paper presents a memory and computation efficient three dimensional simulation system for the ultraviolet (UV) lithography process of thick SU-8. The simulation system is developed based on a novel fast marching method based on full hash table. To investigate the simulation system, some simulations under different lithography conditions have been conducted by this system, using various simulation grid arrays. The corresponding experiments have been implemented to verify the simulation results, and all studies are carried out on SU-8 2075 under UV source with 365nm (2.6mW/cm 2 ) radiation. The simulated development profiles demonstrate to be in agreement with the experimental results, and the memory usage during the lithography simulations has been reduced by about 60%, compared with current approaches.
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