In the constant drive to go to smaller feature sizes, the control of the linewidth become more important than ever before, with the intra-field CD-control as a major contributor. It is expected that 248 nm lithography will be used for volume manufacturing of the 0.15 micrometers generation and may even be pushed to 0.13 micrometers . In order to do so, strong resolution enhancement technique such as aggressive optical proximity correction (OPC) and alternating phase- shifting masks (altPSM) will be needed. However a strong interaction with reticle CDs and lens aberrations is expected. With the use of state-of-the-art reticles and lenses, not only the process latitudes at one point in the field but the CD-control across the full field become very important. In this paper an illumination optimization has been done in terms of individual process latitudes, CD- proximity effect and especially the across-field CD- variation. With these optimized stepper settings, a comparison of the intra-field CD-control of binary masks with OPC and altPSM for 0.15 micrometers and 0.13 micrometers features with various duty cycles using a high NA 248nm stepper has been carried out. With binary masks the across-field CD- control for the 0.15micrometers isolated lines is not below 15nm in best focus. The use of sub-resolution assist features improved the across-field CD-uniformity as compared to the binary mask even in best focus. Over a limited focus range 150nm lines had a 3 sigma value below 15nm. It is expected that a higher NA will show this over an even larger focus range, making the assist feature sufficient for 0.15micrometers patterning with an adequate CD-control. For the 0.13micrometers lines alternating phase-shifting masks result in an across- field CD-variation below 13nm over a focus range of 0.4micrometers . For this work ,state-of-the-art reticles have been sued and no attempt was made to remove reticle CD errors from the CD-control data.