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Effective model-based mask fracturing for mask cost reduction

Published: 07 June 2015 Publication History

Abstract

The use of aggressive resolution enhancement techniques like multiple patterning and inverse lithography (ILT) has led to expensive photomasks. Growing mask write time has been a key reason for the cost increase. Moreover, due to scaling, e-beam proximity effects can no longer be ignored. Model-based mask fracturing has emerged as a useful technique to address these critical challenges by allowing overlapping shots and compensating for proximity effects during fracturing itself. However, it has been shown recently that heuristics for model-based mask fracturing can be suboptimal by more than 1:6x on average for ten real ILT shapes, highlighting the need for better heuristics. In this work, we propose a new model-based mask fracturing method that significantly outperforms all the previously reported heuristics. The number of e-beam shots of our method is 23% less than a state-of-the-art prototype version of capability within a commercial EDA tool for e-beam mask shot decomposition (PROTO-EDA) for ten ILT mask shapes. Moreover, our method has an average runtime of less than 1:4s per shape.

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Cited By

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  • (2022)A hybrid heuristic for the rectilinear picture compression problem4OR10.1007/s10288-022-00515-321:2(329-358)Online publication date: 11-Jun-2022
  • (2017)Benchmarking of Mask Fracturing HeuristicsIEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems10.1109/TCAD.2016.262090236:1(170-183)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2017

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  1. Effective model-based mask fracturing for mask cost reduction

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          cover image ACM Conferences
          DAC '15: Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Design Automation Conference
          June 2015
          1204 pages
          ISBN:9781450335201
          DOI:10.1145/2744769
          Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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          Publication History

          Published: 07 June 2015

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          Author Tags

          1. CAD
          2. DFM
          3. EDA
          4. MB-MDP
          5. MDP
          6. VLSI
          7. e-beam
          8. e-beam proximity effect
          9. graph coloring
          10. lithography
          11. mask data prep
          12. mask fracturing
          13. model-based
          14. photomasks
          15. rectilinear covering
          16. semiconductor manufacturing

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          June 7 - 11, 2015
          California, San Francisco

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          Cited By

          View all
          • (2022)A hybrid heuristic for the rectilinear picture compression problem4OR10.1007/s10288-022-00515-321:2(329-358)Online publication date: 11-Jun-2022
          • (2017)Benchmarking of Mask Fracturing HeuristicsIEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems10.1109/TCAD.2016.262090236:1(170-183)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2017

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