This paper presents a new technique to detect non-Litho-Friendly design areas based on their Aerial Image signature. The aerial image is calculated for the litho target (pre-OPC). This is followed by the fixing (retargeting) the design to achieve a litho friendly OPC target. This technique is applied and tested on 28 nm metal layer and shows a big improvement in the process window performance. For an optimized Aerial-Image-Retargeting (AIR) recipe is very computationally efficient and its runtime doesn’t consume more than 1% of the OPC flow runtime.

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