How can design for manufacturing improve mask cost and yield?

The relentless pursuit of Moore's Law is pushing lithographical equipment to its limits. Extensive use of resolution enhancement technologies (RET) during mask synthesis has allowed the industry to meet demand for density and performance at the 0.13um node and below. RET has been used to sustain the traditional model of printing edges as close as possible to the corresponding edges in the design layout. As technology moves to sub-100nm processes, this model is proving to be both challenging and expensive to sustain. Pushing the RET tools to do an aggressive match between layout geometries and the printed pattern results in a large increase in mask cost. Even if this optimization is successful, the resulting pattern may not provide the highest possible yield. By providing design intent information along with the design layout, the mask synthesis (MS) flow is able to optimize the printed pattern for both improved yield and mask cost reduction (Rieger, et al., 2002). This paper describes the challenges faced by the mask synthesis flow and how it can be improved using design intent, which is generated as part of the design flow. It describes specific details on the content of design intent. It also presents some experimental results on the benefits of this flow in mask shot count and sliver count reduction.