基于水平集的增强工艺鲁棒性反向光刻快速算法及其应用
Fast Level-set-based Inverse Lithography Algorithm for Process Robustness Improvement and Its Application
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摘要: 由于193nm的光源仍然在先进的集成电路(IC)工艺节点中使用,反向光刻技术(ILT)成为当前最为热门的分辨率增强技术(RETs)之一.在所有的反向光刻算法中,基于水平集的反向光刻技术(LSB-ILT)是一种可行的选择,并在工业界获得良好的量产效果.然而,现有的ILT算法只考虑在标准工艺条件下优化掩模,没有对工艺偏差带来的影响给予足够的考虑,因此优化出来的掩模在光强和焦距发生变化时的性能显示较差.在本文中,我们提出了一种新的基于水平集的增强工艺鲁棒性反向光刻算法,并具有较快的收敛速度.为了考虑工艺变化对优化过程的影响,我们采用了一种新的目标函数,将工艺变化带(PV band)的目标函数与标准工艺条件下的目标函数相结合.我们还采用了混合共轭梯度(CG)的方法,以缩短算法的运行时间.我们对2013年ICCAD的比赛样例进行实验,结果表明,新算法的得分比ICCAD 2013比赛的前两名的得分平均高出6.5%.我们还在实验中采用了削弱式相移掩模(ATT-PSM),这些测试样例来自于工业界.研究结果表明,我们的新算法具有较快的收敛速度,与不考虑PV band的水平集反向光刻算法相比,减少工艺制造指数(PMI)达38.77%.Abstract: Inverse lithography technology (ILT) is one of the promising resolution enhancement techniques (RETs), as the advanced integrated circuits (IC) technology nodes still use the 193nm light source. Among all the algorithms for ILT, the level-set-based ILT (LSB-ILT) is a feasible choice with good production result in practice. However, existing ILT algorithms optimize mask at nominal process condition without giving sufficient attention to the process variations, and thus the optimized masks show poor performance with focus and dose variations. In this paper, we put forward a new LSB-ILT algorithm for process robustness improvement with fast convergence. In order to account for the process variations in the optimization, we adopt a new form of the cost function by adding the objective function of process variation band (PV band) to the nominal cost. We also adopt the hybrid conjugate gradient (CG) method to reduce the runtime of the algorithm. We perform experiments on ICCAD 2013 benchmarks and the results show that our algorithm outperforms the top two winners of the ICCAD 2013 contest by 6.5%. We also adopt the attenuated Phase Shift Mask (att-PSM) in the experiment with test cases from industry. The results show that our new algorithm has fast convergence speed and reduces the process manufacturability index (PMI) by 38.77% compared with the LSB-ILT algorithm without PV band.