Improved performance of multi tone masks by advanced compensation methods

The drive towards lowering costs and increasing frame rates results in new panel designs and thereby new photomasks designs. One common way to reduce cost is to reduce the number of production steps. For this multi tone photomasks (MTM) are needed. MTMs contain more information and increases photomask placement requirements. Increasing frame rates lead to shrinking geometries. The combination of HTM and shrinking geometries drastically increases the requirements imposed on the pattern generators used to print the photomasks. New methods are therefore needed to enable future photomask manufacturing. This paper introduces three advanced image quality enhancing methods.