Accurate process-hotspot detection using critical design rule extraction

• Published in: Proceedings of the 49th Annual Design Automation Conference pp. 1167 - 1172
• Main Authors: Yu, Yen-Ting, Chan, Ya-Chung, Sinha, Subarna, Jiang, Iris Hui-Ru, Chiang, Charles
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY, USA ACM 03.06.2012
• Series: ACM Conferences
• Subjects: Hardware > Electronic design automation > Physical design (EDA); design for manufacturability; design rule checking; pattern matching; lithography; process hotspot
• ISBN: 1450311997; 9781450311991
• DOI: 10.1145/2228360.2228576

In advanced fabrication technology, the sub-wavelength lithography gap causes unwanted layout distortions. Even if a layout passes design rule checking (DRC), it still might contain process hotspots, which are sensitive to the lithographic process. Hence, process-hotspot detection has become a crucial issue. In this paper, we propose an accurate process-hotspot detection framework. Unlike existing DRC-based works, we extract only critical design rules to express the topological features of hotspot patterns. We adopt a two-stage filtering process to locate all hotspots accurately and efficiently. Compared with state-of-the-art DRC-based works, our results show that our approach can reach 100% success rate with significant speedups.