Abstract: A sensor arrangement may be used to measure properties, such as optical properties, of a device arranged to process substrates. The sensor arrangement includes a substrate having the following: a plurality of sensor elements provided as an integrated circuit in the substrate, for each one of the plurality of sensor elements associated electronic circuitry comprising a processing circuit connected to the sensor element and an input/output interface connected to the processing circuit, and a power supply unit configured to supply operating power only to the electronic circuitry associated with one or more of the plurality of sensor elements which are in use. The at least one sensor element and possibly the processing electronics, the input/output unit, and/or the power supply unit may be provided as one or more integrated circuits or other structures in the substrate.

Abstract: A maskless lithography system is described having a programmable mask to allow performing several lithographic steps using the same mask. In every lithographic step, the corresponding pattern is obtained by providing a digital pattern to the programmable mask. The programmable mask includes an array of pixels which are based on the electro-wetting principle. According to this principle, every pixel has a transparent reservoir containing a first, non-polar, non-transparent fluid and a second, polar, transparent fluid which are immiscible. Applying a field to the reservoir allows to displace the fluids with respect to each other. This allows to make the pixel either transparent or non-transparent. This lithographic programmable mask allows high resolution and fast setting and refreshing. A corresponding method for performing maskless optical lithography also is described.

Abstract: For lithographically manufacturing a device with a very high density, a design mask pattern (120) is distributed on a number of sub-patterns (120a, 120b, 120c) by means of a new method. The sub-patterns do not comprise “forbidden” structures (135) and can be transferred by conventional apparatus to a substrate layer to be patterned. For the transfer, a new stack of layers is used, which comprise a pair of a processing layer (22; 26) and an inorganic anti-reflection layer (24; 28) for each sub-pattern. After a first processing layer (26) has been patterned with a first sub-pattern, it is coated with a new resist layer (30) which is exposed with a second sub-pattern, and a second processing layer (22) under the first processing layer is processed with the second sub-pattern.