Optical proximity correction (OPC) friendly maze routing

• Published in: Annual ACM IEEE Design Automation Conference: Proceedings of the 41st annual conference on Design automation; 07-11 June 2004 pp. 186 - 191
• Main Authors: Huang, Li-Da, Wong, Martin D. F.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY, USA ACM 07.06.2004; IEEE; Association for Computing Machinery
• Series: ACM Conferences
• Subjects: Adaptive optics; Applied computing > Physical sciences and engineering > Engineering; Applied sciences; Atmosphere; Costs; Design. Technologies. Operation analysis. Testing; Electronics; Exact sciences and technology; Hardware; Input-output equipment; Integrated circuits; Lagrangian functions; Lithography; Manufacturing processes; Microelectronic fabrication (materials and surfaces technology); Optical diffraction; Optical distortion; Photonic integrated circuits; Routing; Semiconductor electronics. Microelectronics. Optoelectronics. Solid state devices; manufacturing; micro-lithography; maze routing; OPC; VLSI; optical system; Optical proximity correction; Critical size; Circuit design; Lithography; Light diffraction; Shortest path; Proximity effect; Router; Algorithm; Look up table; Optical interference; Microelectronic fabrication; Optical characteristic; Relaxation method; Miniaturization; Lagrangian method; Computer aided design
• ISBN: 1581138288; 9781581138283; 1511838288
• ISSN: 0738-100X
• DOI: 10.1145/996566.996622

As the technology migrates into the deep submicron manufacturing(DSM) era, the critical dimension of the circuits is getting smaller than the lithographic wavelength. The unavoidable light diffraction phenomena in the sub-wavelength technologies have become one of the major factors in the yield rate. Optical proximity correction (OPC) is one of the methods adopted to compensate for the light diffraction effect as a post layout process.However, the process is time-consuming and the results are still limited by the original layout quality. In this paper, we propose a maze routing method that considers the optical effect in the routing algorithm. By utilizing the symmetrical property of the optical system, the light diffraction is efficiently calculated and stored in tables. The costs that guide the router to minimize the optical interferences are obtained from these look-up tables. The problem is first formulated as a constrained maze routing problem, then it is shown to be a multiple constrained shortest path problem. Based on the Lagrangian relaxation method, an effective algorithm is designed to solve the problem.