Metal layer OPC repair flow for 28NM node and beyond

摘要

At node 28nm and beyond, metal layer have the smallest pitch and the most flexible in design of the critical layer. Various layout patterns on metal layers are challenging to runtime, OPC tools and OPC engineers. The OPC verification played as the role of highlighting fail patterns, and feeding back to the OPC Engineer for further learning and enhancing in the OPC recipe. In this paper the authors presented metal layer OPC repair flow for 28nm node and beyond. An automatic analysis methodology for the pinching, the bridging and the coverage errors were discussed. Next, according to the automated analysis of the error, the OPC repair flow is applied on all locations. This helped in cutting down the total runtime and reached the status of zero errors. This paper also compared the OPC verify result and total runtime of without OPC repair flow and using OPC repair flow. After using OPC repair flow, the OPC verify results are acceptable, and total runtime is reduced greatly.