Efficient DSA-DP Hybrid Lithography Conflict Detection and Guiding Template Assignment

In recent years, directed self-assembly (DSA) has demonstrated tremendous potential to reduce cost for multiple patterning with fewer masks, especially for via patterning. DSA is considered as one of the next generation lithography candidates or complementary lithography techniques to extend 193i lithography further for the sub7 nm nodes. In this work, we focus on the simultaneous DSA guiding template assignment and decomposition with DSA and double patterning (DSA-DP) hybrid lithography for 7nm technology node. We first analyze the placement error of DSA patterns with different shapes and sizes. We then propose a graph-based approach to reduce the problem size and solve the problem more efficiently without affecting the optimality of the results. The experimental results demonstrate that we can achieve a 50% reduction in both the number of variables and constraints compared to previous work, which leads to a 50X speed up in runtime.