Patent ID: 7250237

Claim:
A method of correcting thermally-induced field deformations of a lithographically exposed substrate, comprising: exposing a pattern onto a plurality of fields of a substrate in accordance with pre-specified exposure information including at least one of exposure energy information, exposure time information, exposure field position information, exposure field sequencing information, and exposure field deformation information; measuring attributes of said fields to assess deformation of said fields induced by thermal effects of said exposing; determining corrective information based on said measured attributes; adjusting said pre-specified exposure information deformation effects based on said corrective information, to compensate for the thermally-induced field deformations; providing a model to predict thermally-induced field deformation information; and modifying said pre-specified exposure information prior to exposing, based on said predicted thermally-induced deformation information wherein said predicted thermally-induced field deformation includes predicting deformation effects of selected points within each of said fields based on a global expansion model.