Simultaneous EUV flare variation minimization and CMP control with coupling-aware dummification

Abstract

EUV flare and CMP metal thickness are two main manufacturability concerns for nanometer process technology. The two dummification objectives, however, are conflicting with each other in nature, but existing works only tackle them separately, leading to problem-prone solutions because optimizing one would deteriorate the other. This paper presents the first work that simultaneously considers both concerns during manufacturability optimization. Given a system's point spread function, our proposed method first finds an initial solution with better-than-state-of-the-art EUV flare uniformity, then followed by gradient-guided optimization to iteratively refine density uniformity. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our method.