A Modified 3D fast marching simulation for thick photoresists lithography

Abstract

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.