Performance-deriven opc for mask cost reduction

With continued aggressive process scaling in the subwavelength lithographic regime, resolution enhancement techniques (RETs) such as optical proximity correction (OPC) are an integral part of the design to mask flow. OPC adds complex features to the layout, re-sulting in mask data volume explosion and increased mask costs. Traditionally the mask flow has suffered from a lack of design in-formation, such that all features (whether critical or non-critical) are treated alike by RET insertion. A recent work [1] proposes to exploit design information (timing slacks) to reduce OPC data vol-ume, but has a number of impractical aspects. In this paper, we propose an implementable flow that drives model-based OPC ex-plicitly by timing constraints, with the objective of reducing mask data volume and OPC runtime. We apply a mathematical program-ming based slack budgeting algorithm to determine edge placement error (EPE) tolerance budgets for all polysilicon gate geometries. These tolerances are then enforced by a commercial OPC tool to achieve up to 24 % MEBES data volume and 41 % OPC runtime re-ductions on a suite of six testcases implemented in Artisan TSMC 0.13um libraries. 1