Efficient Process-Hotspot Detection Using Range Pattern Matching

In current manufacturing processes, certain layout configurations are likely to have reduced yield and/or reliability due to increased susceptibility to stress effects or poor tolerance to certain processes like lithography. These problematic layout configurations need to be efficiently detected and eliminated from a design layout to enable better yield. In this paper, such layout configurations are called process-hotspots and an efficient and scalable algorithm is proposed to detect such process-hotspots in a given layout. The concept of a range pattern is introduced and used to accurately and compactly represent these process-hotspots. This representation is flexible and can incorporate information about the deficiencies of available modeling and/or subsequent correction (for instance, mask synthesis) techniques. Each range pattern can also be associated with a scoring mechanism to score the problem regions according to yield impact. A library of range patterns is being developed in collaboration with a fab. The proposed process-hotspot detection system assumes that process-hotspots are specified as a library of range patterns and determines all occurrences of any of these range patterns in a layout. It is fast and accurate and can be applied to large industrial layouts. Unlike previous work, the proposed scheme can identify problems that cannot be efficiently modeled or corrected by subsequent mask synthesis techniques and can thereby complement existing work in that area. Experimental results are quite promising and show that all locations that match a range pattern in a given layout can be found in a matter of minutes