The best lithography software for ion beam systems

Having been affiliated and/or worked in 5 national facilities in Singapore and the United states, I came across a number of lithography software for ion beam systems (SEM, FIB, etc...). The best lithography software that I ever came across, in my opinion, is Joe Nabity's Nanometer Pattern Generation System [NPGS].

NPGS is user-friendly and simply works out of the box! Joe Nabity is a one man company. He's known to answer all his emails and provides very good support. I had the chance to interact with him and he does genuinely listen to user's concerns, and makes every effort to address them.

The other major competing software (Raith150, Elphy, etc...) on the market is from Raith. Although some researchers have successfully mastered it, the control system has bugs and a superfluous alignment of the writefield is necessary before patterning. Also, there's poor software support. I talked to the engineers at Raith concerning improving some of the features of the elphy for Harvard's FIB and they were pretty reluctant to change anything. Personally, the software is bloated and needs a complete rewrite. It has also become too esoteric and needs a lite version.

It's analogous to facebook which has way too many things that a facebook lite was needed. Fortunately they realized it. Along the same line, this is the reason why Google created Chrome instead of trying to fix firefox!