On-Demand Data Pumping for Digital Micromirror Device 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, there were techniques on lossless data compression and on high performance data transmission. Many applications using Digital Micro-mirror Device (DMD) require huge and reliable data transmission and high performance processing capabilities enough to make continuous resource flow to the DMD image processing system. In this paper, we present a high data rate pumping method the pattern data to DMD unit on-demand, and implement on Windows-based system as kernel driver for 64-bit PCI interface. We use an evaluation DMD adapter which supports high performance 32/64-bit PCI interface, high-speed FIFO operation with DMA and critical interrupt priority. High priority interrupt with tightly-coupled DMA access technology is used to get high-performance transmission, and we can see that the performance is about 42% of PCI full bandwidth.