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The relentless pursuit of Moore's Law is pushing lithographical equipment to its limits. Extensive use of Resolution Enhancement Technologies (RET) during mask synthesis has allowed the industry to meet demand for density and performance at the 0.13um node and below. RET has been used to sustain the traditional model of printing edges as close as possible to the corresponding edges in the design layout. As technology moves to sub-100nm processes this model is proving to be both challenging and expensive to sustain. Pushing the RET tools to do an aggressive match between layout geometries and the printed pattern results in a large increase in mask cost. Even if this optimization is successful the resulting pattern may not provide the highest possible yield. In previous papers 1 we demonstrated the use of design intent 2 (DI) during mask synthesis to both reduce mask cost and improve yield. In this paper more results are described of how much improvement is possible on mask shot count and sliver count. We also investigate the cell level timing impact of our proposed methodology. Detailed timing results are presented and analyzed along with their impact on the design flow.

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