Autonomous optical proximity correction: The new frontier of design for manufacturing?

As the CMOS scaling enters even deeper sub-wavelength lithography (i.e., 193nm lithography for 45nm, 32nm, and even 22nm nodes), tighter design and process integration is mandatory for the overall design and manufacturing closure. There are tremendous academic/industry research efforts on the manufacturability aware design, e.g., through hotspot detection/elimination during or post routing. But due to the stringent turn-around-time requirement, only rough metrics/models or rules can be used which significantly limits its effectiveness. On the other hand, optical proximity correction (OPC), as a step much closer to manufacturing, does not have “rights” to change design, even small ECO type of changes. Since OPC process has the most accurate view about image printability for a given design, we believe that there is a possible new frontier to tightly link design and manufacturing together, by pushing the mainstream OPC to be more aggressive through automatic model based layout modifications directly, guided jointly by accurate lithography simulation and design intention. We demonstrate the principle and effectiveness of the autonomous OPC (AOPC) paradigm, show possible solutions and discuss related challenges.