Stitch-aware routing for multiple e-beam lithography

Multiple e-beam lithography (MEBL) is one of the most promising next generation lithography (NGL) technologies for high volume manufacturing, which improves the most critical issue of conventional single e-beam lithography, throughput, by simultaneously using thousands or millions of e-beams. For parallel writing in MEBL, a layout is split into stripes and patterns are cut by stripe boundaries, which are defined as stitching lines. Critical patterns cut by stitching lines could suffer from severe pattern distortion or even yield loss. Therefore, considering the positions of stitching lines and avoiding stitching line-induced bad patterns are required during layout design. In this paper, we propose the first work of stitch-aware routing framework for MEBL based on a two-pass bottom-up multilevel router. We first identify three types of stitching line-induced bad patterns which should not exist in an MEBL-friendly routing solution. Then, stitch-aware routing algorithms are respectively developed for global routing, layer/track assignment and detailed routing. Experimental results show that our stitch-aware routing framework can effectively reduce stitching line-induced bad patterns and thus may not only improve the manufacturability but also facilitate the development of MEBL.