Verification System Compresses Mask Production Cycle

摘要

As the technology and the industry progress from 65 to 45 nm architectures, fabs are increasingly finding one i 1 of the major challenges that they face is the work and time required to verify masks enhanced with optical proximity correction (OPC), which are being used in production more and more — including for some back-end layers. OPC techniques very efficiently use a variety of non-printing features to compensate for optical proximity effects; however, this also has the unfortunate effect of multiplying the complexity of the mask. What once was a minor issue at the 130 or 90 nm nodes has now become a major, costly manufacturing and development hurdle.