Color balancing for triple patterning lithography with complex designs

Haitong Tian; Hongbo Zhang; Martin D. F. Wong

doi:10.1117/12.2026285

10 September 2013 Color balancing for triple patterning lithography with complex designs

Haitong Tian, Hongbo Zhang, Martin D. F. Wong

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 8880, Photomask Technology 2013; 88800I (2013) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2026285
Event: SPIE Photomask Technology, 2013, Monterey, California, United States

Abstract

With the minimum feature size keeps shrinking, there are increasing difficulties to print these small features using one exposure (LE) or double exposures (LELE). To resolve the inherent physical limitations for current lithography techniques, triple patterning lithography (LELELE) has been widely recognized as one the most promising options for 14/10nm technology node. For triple patterning lithography (TPL), the designers are more interested in finding a decomposition with none of the three masks overwhelms the other. This color balancing issue is of crucial importance to ensure that consistent and reliable printing qualities can be achieved. In our previous work,18 a simple color balancing scheme is proposed to handle designed without stitches, which is not capable of handling complex designs with stitches. In this paper, we further extend the previous approach to be able to simultaneously optimizing the number of stitches and balancing the color usage in the three masks. This new approach is very efficient and robust, and guarantees to find a color balancing decomposition while achieving the optimal number of stitches. For the largest benchmark with over 10 million features, experimental results show that the new approach achieves almost perfect color balancing with reasonable runtime.

Citation Download Citation

Haitong Tian, Hongbo Zhang, and Martin D. F. Wong "Color balancing for triple patterning lithography with complex designs", Proc. SPIE 8880, Photomask Technology 2013, 88800I (10 September 2013); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2026285

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