Sparse nonlinear inverse imaging for shot count reduction in inverse lithography.

Inverse lithography technique (ILT) is significant to reduce the feature size of ArF optical lithography due to its strong ability to overcome the optical proximity effect. A critical issue for inverse lithography is the complex curvilinear patterns produced, which are very costly to write due to the large number of shots needed with the current variable shape beam (VSB) writers. In this paper, we devise an inverse lithography method to reduce the shot count by incorporating a model-based fracturing (MBF) in the optimization. The MBF is formulated as a sparse nonlinear inverse imaging problem based on representing the mask as a linear combination of shots followed by a threshold function. The problem is approached with a Gauss-Newton algorithm, which is adapted to promote sparsity of the solution, corresponding to the reduction of the shot count. Simulations of inverse lithography are performed on several test cases, and results demonstrate reduced shot count of the resulting mask.