The extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUVL) program at IMEC is aimed to tackle many unsolved critical issues of EUV lithography as the technology moves towards production, by focusing specifically on tool, resist, and mask projects. Here, the authors describe the structure of the IMEC EUVL program and the status of the EUV alpha demo tool. In particular, they discuss their proposed strategies for flare mitigation and shadowing effect correction. They demonstrate how it is possible to implement an effective rule-based flare mitigation strategy. In addition, they propose a relatively simple methodology to fully compensate for shadowing pattern placement error and critical dimension bias. (c) 2007 American Vacuum Society.