Mask Corner Chopping Strategy Optimization and Its Impact on Random 2D Logic Pattern OPC Recipe Accuracy

Abstract

At advanced node, mask making details need to be taken into account in OPC in order to achieve the demanded accuracy. Mask corner rounding, which is often emulated by corner chopping of polygons in OPC implementation, is one such an example. In this work, we demonstrated fixed radius corner-chop improves OPC accuracy, however, such an implementation is unable to offer required OPC accuracy, since it still leaves non-negligible ADI error at some random 2D patterns. A 3-segments rule based chop strategy is proposed and tested with which significant simulation accuracy improvement is achieved at little extra computational cost.