Nanowire-aware routing considering high cut mask complexity

One-dimensional nanowires are one of the most promising next-generation lithography technologies for 7 nm process node and beyond. The 1D nanowire process first constructs a 1D nanoarray through template synthesis followed by line-end cutting with additional cut masks. To achieve better yield and manufacturability, the cut patterns shall satisfy specified restricted design rules, and thus it is desirable to develop a novel routing methodology to better address the challenges arising from cut patterns. In this paper, we propose the first nanowire-aware routing system, called NWR, considering high cut-mask complexity based on a two-pass, bottom-up multilevel routing framework. Experimental results show that our nanowire-aware router can effectively and efficiently reduce cut numbers, cut spacing violations, and line-end extension length.