Image‐projection ion‐beam lithography is an attractive alternative for submicron patterning because it may provide high throughput; it uses demagnification to gain advantages in reticle fabrication, inspection, and lifetime; and it enjoys the precise deposition characteristics of ions which cause essentially no collateral damage. This lithographic option involves extracting low‐mass ions (e.g., He+) from a plasma source, transmitting the ions at low voltage through a stencil reticle, and then accelerating and focusing the ions electrostatically onto a resist‐coated wafer. While the advantages of this technology have been demonstrated experimentally by the work of IMS (Austria), many difficulties still impede extension of the technology to the high‐volume production of microelectronic devices. We report a computational study of a lithography system designed to address problem areas in field size, telecentricity, and chromatic and geometric aberration. We present a novel ion‐column‐design approach and conceptual ion‐source and column designs which address these issues. We find that image‐projection ion‐beam technology should in principle meet high‐volume‐production requirements. The technical success of our present relatively compact‐column design requires that a glow‐discharge‐based ion source (or equivalent cold source) be developed and that moderate further improvement in geometric aberration levels be obtained. Our system requires that image predistortion be employed during reticle fabrication to overcome distortion due to residual image nonlinearity and space‐charge forces. This constitutes a software data preparation step, as do correcting for distortions in electron lithography columns and performing proximity‐effect corrections. Areas needing further fundamental work are identified.