Pattern sensitive placement perturbation for manufacturability

Abstract

The gap between VLSI technology and fabrication technology leads to strong refractive effects in lithography. Consequently, it is a huge challenge to reliably print layout features on wafers. The quality and robustness of lithography directly depend on layout patterns. It becomes imperative to consider the manufacturability issue during layout design such that the burden of lithography process can be alleviated. In this paper, three algorithms, namely, cell flipping algorithm, single row optimization approach and multiple row optimization approach, are proposed to tune any existing cell placement to be lithography friendly. These algorithms are based on dynamic programming and graph theoretic approaches, and can provide different tradeoff between critical dimension (CD) variation reduction and wirelength increase. Using lithography simulations, our experimental results demonstrate that over 15% CD variation reduction can be obtained in post-OPC stage by the new approaches while only less than 1% additional wire is introduced. © 2009 IEEE.