Process Variation Aware OPC with Variational Lithography.pdfVIP

Process Variation Aware OPC with Variational Lithography Modeling Peng Yu Sean X. Shi David Z. Pan ECE Department ECE Department ECE Department University of Texas at Austin University of Texas at Austin University of Texas at Austin Austin, TX 78712 Austin, TX 78712 Austin, TX 78712 yupeng@cerc.utexas.edu sean.shi@mail.utexas.edu dpan@ece.utexas.edu ABSTRACT (NGL) systems are not likely to be in the mainstream in the near Optical proximity correction (OPC) is one of the most widely used future, it is expected that more and more extensive RETs will be resolution enhancement techniques (RET) in nanometer designs used to push the lithography systems to their limits [12, 16, 22, 23]. to improve subwavelength printability. Conventional model-based To make the lithographic challenges even worse, process variations OPC assumes nominal process parameters without considering pro- during manufacturing, such as those from dosage and focus varia- cess variations, due to prohibitive runtimes of lithography simula- tions, will also affect the final product yield. tions across process windows. This is the first paper to propose a OPC is one of the most widely used RETs by simply modify- true process-variation aware OPC (PV-OPC) framework. It is en- ing the mask patterns to improve the printability [18]. Traditional abled by the variational lithography m