Combining multiple patterning lithography (MPL) and optical proximity correction (OPC) pushes the limit of 193-nm wavelength lithography to go further. Considering that layout decomposition may generate plenty of solutions with diverse printabilities, relying on conventional mask optimization (MO) process to select the best candidate for manufacturing is computationally expensive. Therefore, an accurate and efficient printability estimation is crucial and can significantly accelerate the layout decomposition and MO (LDMO) flow. In this article, we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based prediction and integrate it into our new high-performance LDMO framework. The optimization process can be considerably improved as the decomposition quality has been inferred in the early phase. To facilitate the network training and ensure better estimation accuracy, we develop sampling strategies for both layout and decomposition. Moreover, we enhance the layout sampling approach by adopting autoencoder to distance evaluation that promises superior sampling results. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and the efficiency of the proposed algorithms.

Combining multiple pattern lithography (MPL) and optical proximity correlation (OPC) pushes the limit of 193nm wavelength lithography to go further. Considering that layout decomposition may generate plenty of solutions with diverse printabilities, relying on conventional mask optimization process to select the best candidates for manufacturing is computationally expensive. Therefore, an accurate and efficient printability estimation is crucial and can significantly accelerate the layout decomposition and mask optimization (LDMO) process. In this paper, we propose a CNN based prediction and integrate it into our new high performance LDMO framework. We also develop both the layout and the decomposition sampling strategies to facilitate the network training. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and the efficiency of the proposed algorithms.