Optical maskless lithography for fast and low-cost design to wafer

Increasing market pressures force design and manufacturing communities to come up with innovative and flexible design and manufacturing solutions to control cost and time to market. This work shows that optical maskless lithography (OML), requiring no mask at all, has lowest cost and shortest design-to-wafer times while keeping transparency to mask-based optical lithography and allowing for resolution enhancement via known low-k/sub 1/ imaging methods such as hard phase shifting and strong OPC.