With being pushed into sub-16nm regime, advanced technology nodes printing in optical micro-lithography relies heavily on aggressive Optical Proximity Correction (OPC) in the foreseeable future. Although acceptable pattern fidelity is utilized under process variations, mask design time and mask manufacturability form crucial parameters whose tackling in the OPC recipe is highly demanded by the industry. In this paper, we propose an intensity based OPC algorithm to find a highly manufacturable mask solution for a target pattern with acceptable pattern fidelity under process variations within a short computation time. This is achieved through utilizing a fast intensity estimation model in which intensity is numerically correlated with local mask density and kernel type to estimate the intensity in a short time and with acceptable estimation accuracy. This estimated intensity is used to guide feature shifting, alignment, and concatenation following linearly interpolated variational intensity error model to achieve high mask manufacturability with preserving acceptable pattern fidelity under process variations. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm on the public benchmarks.

Title

IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences

Publisher

The Institute of Electronics, Information, and Communication Engineering

Publisher Country

Japan

Indexing

Thomson Reuters

Impact Factor

0.4

Publication Type

Prtinted only

Volume

99

Year

2016

Pages

2363-2374