  Layout fracturing is a fundamental step in mask data preparation and e-beam
lithography (EBL) writing. To increase EBL throughput, recently a new L-shape
writing strategy is proposed, which calls for new L-shape fracturing, versus
the conventional rectangular fracturing. Meanwhile, during layout fracturing,
one must minimize very small/narrow features, also called slivers, due to
manufacturability concern. This paper addresses this new research problem of
how to perform L-shaped fracturing with sliver minimization. We propose two
novel algorithms. The first one, rectangular merging (RM), starts from a set of
rectangular fractures and merges them optimally to form L-shape fracturing. The
second algorithm, direct L-shape fracturing (DLF), directly and effectively
fractures the input layouts into L-shapes with sliver minimization. The
experimental results show that our algorithms are very effective.
