BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION

Field of the Invention

The present invention relates to an exposure apparatus, and an article manufacturing method using them.

Description of the Related Art

There is known an exposure apparatus for transferring a pattern of an original (mask) to a photosensitive substrate through a projection optical system. Recently, with an increasing size of the substrate subjected to exposure by the exposure apparatus, the mask in which the pattern is formed has also been increasing. The larger size of the mask increases the cost of the mask itself, prolongs the manufacturing time of the mask, and increases the manufacturing cost of the mask.

Under that situation, an attention is focused on the so-called maskless exposure apparatus capable of forming a pattern on a substrate without using a mask in which the pattern is formed. The maskless exposure apparatus is a digital exposure apparatus using an optical modulator such as a Digital Micromirror Device (DMD). According to the maskless exposure apparatus, the pattern can be formed on the substrate without using the mask by generating exposure light corresponding to an exposure pattern with the DMD, and by performing an exposure in accordance with pattern data, which corresponds to the exposure pattern, on the substrate.

Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2004-62155 discloses a maskless exposure apparatus in which a pattern is formed on a substrate by making a laser beam emitted from a laser emission unit incident on individual optical modulation elements of an optical modulation unit, and by modulating the incident laser beam into either an exposure state or a non-exposure state with each optical modulation element.

In the maskless exposure apparatus disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2004-62155, a plurality of projection optical systems each including one DMD are arrayed and a substrate is exposed with an optical image formed by each DMD as a spot image. As the size of the substrate subjected to exposure by the maskless exposure apparatus increases, the number of the projection optical systems to be arrayed also increases.

An increase in the number of the projection optical systems to be arrayed further increases the number of overlapped exposure regions in which the exposure is performed in an overlapped state by the projection optical systems arranged adjacent to each other. In the overlapped exposure region, the resolution performance of exposure light tends to be reduced under influences of arrangement errors in the projection optical systems and so on. It is hence preferred to reduce the number of the overlapped exposure regions as far as possible from the viewpoint of increasing the accuracy of a pattern formed on the substrate.

An object of the present invention is to provide an exposure apparatus which can realize an improvement in the resolution performance of exposure light.

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

The present invention provides an exposure apparatus including an illumination optical system including a first optical modulation unit having a plurality of optical modulation elements, a second optical modulation unit having a plurality of optical modulation elements, and an imaging optical system forming optical images on a predetermined plane by using lights from the first optical modulation unit and the second optical modulation unit, and a projection optical system projecting the optical image formed on the predetermined plane onto a substrate.

Further features of the present invention will become apparent from the following description of exemplary embodiments with reference to the attached drawings.

