Digital image processing applied to imaging interferometric lithography

Over the past several decades, progress in VLSI technology has been characterized by an ever-decreasing feature size with optical lithography being the dominant manufacturing technique. Optical lithography is about to enter the fundamentally new regime of printing dense features at dimensions appreciably smaller than the wavelength. Imaging interferometric lithography (IIL) has been introduced as an innovative and powerful approach to optical lithography to realize this promise. IIL is based on a detailed understanding of the ultimate capabilities of optical lithography derived from a spatial frequency space perspective. This paper describes the application of digital image processing techniques in the Fourier domain applied to IIL.