Enhanced e-beam system for the fabrication of optical elements

Conventional e-beam systems are not well suited to write curved structures. These structures need to be broken into many small trapezoidal shapes to achieve the required quality for optical elements. This breakdown usually generates huge files of data. We have proposed to add a conic shape to the basic set of primitives. Compared to the conventional trapezoidal breakdown, the conic primitive approach requires up to 20 times less data to describe curved structures without being impaired by approximation errors. © 1995 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.