NanoScope™ POA (Pattern based OPC Accelerator) is a significant cost and time saving tool for model-based Optical Proximity Correction (OPC) at advanced technology nodes. With its powerful, proprietary pattern-centric approach, the tool analyzes full chip design space geometry information to create unique pattern library and reuses OPC data for matched patterns in the library to improve performance efficiency. POA has gone through rigorous testing at the leading edge customer sites for full chip designs, and the technology has proven itself to shorten the time-to-mask.

Benefits:

• Performance acceleration: POA provides users at least 10 times of performance gain for logic designs over conventional model-based OPC flow. More performance gains are expected for designs with highly repeated cells and patterns
• Low COO: By adopting NanoScope™ POA, high volume production users of OPC tool can easily cut the baseline tool usage by 50% or more
• Improved OPC quality: POA produces more consistent OPC results comparing with conventional model-based flow. It guarantees same patterns have same OPC corrections, which overcomes OPC convergence issues and makes tight CD budget easily achievable

Features:

• Seamless 3rd party OPC tool integration
• OPC accuracy is guaranteed by the input post-OPC designs generated from 3rd party baseline OPC tools
• Fast pattern matching and retrieving with highly efficient data structures of OPC pattern library
• OPC pattern library can be built up in incremental approach to avoid tape-out crunch
• Easy and effective OPC pattern library database management utilities
• Tool performance is linear scalable up to hundreds of CPUs
• No special hardware needed to handle TB pattern library

Pattern-Based OPC Accelerator Application Flow