Fast Display of Full View of the JobDeck/Pattern File

When a user wants a full display of the entire reticle as defined by the job deck, the mbs2tiff program may need to render/rasterize millions of trapezoids even through the majority of them are smaller than a pixel. A new mode, triggered by the argument "-nodetail", can generate a much faster (if less detailed) full view.

How it Works

MEBES data is organized into stripes. Stripe height and width can vary depending on the address unit (AU) but a typical value is 0.5 mm wide and 0.1 mm high as shown below (not to scale). A standard reticle is 150 x 150 mm with an active area of about 100 x 100 mm. So it is not unusual to have 40 to 50 thousand stripes.

In "No Detail" mode instead of rasterizing each trapezoid inside of each stripe separately, a short cut is taken. A quick computation is done to compute the percent of each stripe that is covered in trapezoids. This percent is then compared against a user defined threshold value. The entire stripe is rendered either as black or white depending on whether the stripe "density" is above or below the user set threshold.