Guiding Template-Induced Design Challenges in DSA-MP Lithography

Directed self-assembly (DSA) has become one of the most promising next generation lithography technologies especially for contact/via layer fabrication. Guiding templates are required to generate contact/via holes at desired positions, while there is only a limited number of feasible guiding templates and thus feasible via arrangements. On the other hand, guiding templates need to be first generated with conventional optical lithography, whose limited resolution causes the need of adopting multiple patterning (MP) technologies for dense template generation. This paper demonstrates the design challenges resulted from simultaneous contact/via assignment and layout decomposition of guiding templates, and state-of-the-art works are introduced to show the recent progress on DSA-MP-related optimization problems.