Abbe-PCA-SMO: microlithography source and mask optimization based on Abbe-PCA

Abstract

Simultaneous source and mask optimization (SMO) has been shown to be an effective method to improve the quality of microlithography aerial imaging. However, the increasing computational complexity is also serious given that current optical proximity correction (OPC) runtime has already been very long. In this paper, we show that SMO can be done efficiently in our previous proposed Abbe-PCA method framework. Different from the Hopkins method, Abbe-PCA directly perform eigen-decomposition on the Abbe sources. In this framework, source modification is easy and efficient. Experimental results show that more than 10X runtime improvement is observed.