Lossless high-speed data compression for optical interconnects as used in maskless lithography systems

The maskless lithography technology requires the management and transmission of exposure data at very high data rates. To meet these requirements an effective representation of the data is necessary which leads to the need for lossless data compression. In this paper, common standard compression techniques are compared regarding their applicability and a new lossless compression approach and its hardware implementation is presented. Furthermore, the trade-off between the buffer size as an essential part of the compression scheme and the compression ratio is examined. The problem of DC balance related to optical transmission is explicitly addressed and being solved by a DC-balanced coding. The aim was to develop a cost-optimized method for compressing and decompressing lithography data in real-time and being suitable for circuit integration. The results including a proposed integration in a maskless lithography system are presented here. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.