Enabling online learning in lithography hotspot detection with information-theoretic feature optimization

With the continuous shrinking of technology nodes, lithography hotspot detection and elimination in the physical verification phase is of great value. Recently machine learning and pattern matching based methods have been extensively studied to overcome runtime overhead problem of expensive full-chip lithography simulation. However, there is still much room for improvement in terms of accuracy and Overall Detection and Simulation Time (ODST). In this paper, we propose a unified machine learning based hotspot detection framework, where feature extraction and optimization is guided by an information-theoretic approach and solved by a dynamic programming model. More importantly, our framework can be naturally extended to online learning scenario, where some newly detected and verified layout patterns are integrated into the learning model. Experimental results show that the proposed batch detection model outperforms all state-of-the-art methods with 3.47% of accuracy improvement and 58.88% of ODST reduction on ICCAD-2012 contest benchmark suite. More importantly, equipped with online learning, our framework can further improve both accuracy and ODST.