Self-aligned double patterning (SADP) lithography is a leading technology for 10nm node Metal layer fabrication. In order to achieve successful decomposition, SADP-compliant design becomes a necessity. Spacer-Is-Dielectric (SID) is the most popular flavor of SADP with higher flexibility in design. This paper makes a careful study on the challenges for SID-compliant detailed routing and proposes a graph model to capture the decomposition violations and SID intrinsic residue issues. Then a negotiated congestion based scheme is adopted to solve the overall routing problem. The proposed SID-compliant detailed routing algorithm simultaneously assigns colors to the routed wires, which provides valuable information guiding SID decomposition. In addition, if one pin has multiple candidate locations, the optimal one will be automatically determined during detailed routing. The decomposability of the conflict-free routing layers produced by our detailed router is verified by a commercial SADP decomposition tool.
Extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography is one of the leading technologies for 16nm and smaller node device patterning. One patterning issue intrinsic to EUV lithography is the shadowing effect due to oblique illumination at the mask and mask absorber thickness. This effect can cause CD errors up to a few nanometers, consequently needs to be accounted for in OPC modeling and compensated accordingly in mask synthesis. Because of the dependence on the reticle field coordinates, shadowing effect is very different from the traditional optical and resist effects. It poses challenges to modeling, compensation, and verification that were not encountered in tradition optical lithography mask synthesis.In this paper, we present a systematic approach for shadowing effect modeling and model-based shadowing compensation. Edge based shadowing effect calculation with reticle and scan information is presented. Model calibration and mask synthesis flows are described. Numerical experiments are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.
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