Mill & rasterizing settings#

To create a complete Pattern, a Mill and RasterStyle must be defined along with a patterning shape.

In a pattern, the following pieces of information are collected:

  1. what should be rasterized (geometric shape)

  2. in which way the shape should be rasterized (rasterization style, pitches)

  3. how the rasterized shape should be milled (dwell time and current)

Defining a mill#

In the most simple case, the Mill takes the patterning current and the number of total repeats of a shape as attributes.

from fibomat import Mill, Q_

mill = Mill(current=Q_('1 pA'), repeats=5)

🧪 Providing custom parameters to a mill object#

This can be useful in combination with a custom exporting or custom rasterization styles.

In the extending section, an example is given.

Specifying the rasterization style#

The rasterization styles define, how a shape should be rasterized. For different dimensions, different raster styles are pre-defined. The creation of custom patterning style is explained elsewhere REF.

The default rasterization styles in the fib-o-mat package are introduced in the following.

The subsection refer to examples in the git repository at viggge/fib-o-mat/-/blob/master/examples/raster_styles. These can be executed by

$ python examples/raster_styles/spot.py && beam_simulation rasterized.txt

if the current directory is the root of the fib-o-mat repository. spot.py can be replaced by all other scripts in the examples/raster_styles directory. See also ion beam simulation.

Zero-dim#

Both zero-dimensional raster style do not take any parameters. These raster styles can only be used for Spots and pre-rasterized objects (RasterizedPoints and RasterizedPattern), respectively.

Examples:

One-dim#

The only raster style for 1-dim shapes is the Curve style. This style expects a pitch (distance between neighboring spots) and scan style. All three possible scan styles are visualized below.

Available scan styles for 1-dim shapes.#
../_images/consecutive_1d.png
../_images/back_stitch_1d.png
../_images/back_and_forth_1d.png
Examples:

Two-dim#

fib-o-mat includes two different rasterizing methods of two-dim shapes (LineByLine and ContourParallel). Both rasterization styles fill a given shape with lines or curves. The ordering of these lines and curves is defined by a scan style. All available scan styles are shown below.

LineByLine rasterization#

The line-by-line rasterizing style rasterizes a closed shape by sweeping a line over it. This style is commonly supported in other (proprietary) patterning software.

Details on the method can found at the description of the fill_with_lines method here.

Available scan styles for 2-dim shapes.#
../_images/consecutive_2d.png
../_images/cross_section_2d.png
../_images/serpentine_2d.png
../_images/double_serpentine_2d.png
../_images/double_serpentine_same_path_2d.png
../_images/back_stitch_2d.png

The scan sequences in the figure above only define the ordering of the individual 1-dim shapes which fill the 2-dim shape. In the plot above, the 2-dim shape is a rectangle filled by 1-dim lines. Hence, the 2-dim rasterization styles require also a 1-dim rasterization style as parameter (among others) which will be used for the filling shapes.

ContourParallel offset rasterization#

This style generate contour-parallel offsetted curves of the passed shape to rasterized it.

Examples: