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The procedure for properly implementing OPC for a new technology node or chip design involves multiple steps: selection of the RET (resolution enhance technique), selection of design rules, OPC Model Building, OPC Verification, CD control quantification (across chip, reticle, wafer, focus, exposure, etc), calibration of Optical Rule Checks (ORC), and other verification steps. Many of these steps require up to thousands of wafer measurements, and while state-of-the-art CD-SEM tools provide automated metrology for production, manually creating a CD recipe with thousands of unique sites is extremely tedious and error-prone. This places a practical limit on both the quality and number of measurements that can be acquired during the technology development and qualification period. At the same time, the number of measurements required to qualify a new reticle design has increased drastically due to the growing complexity of RET and diminishing tolerances.
To meet this challenge, a direct and automated link from the design systems to the process metrology tools is needed. Novel methodologies must also be developed to enable automated generation of teh recipe from the design inputs and to translate the flood of metrology results into information that can improve the design, mask data processing, or the patterning process. To facilitate this two-way data flow, a new framework has been created enabling true Design-Based Metrology (DBM), and an application named OPC-Check has been developed to operate within this framework. This DBM framework provides the common language and interface that facilitates the direct transfer of desired measurement locations from teh design to the metrology tool. This link is a critical element in Design for Manufacturability (DFM) efforts, a central theme in many presentations at Microlithography 2005. This article discusses the significant benefits of the tight integration of design and process metrology for OPC implementation in a new technology node, and provides some examples of the novel OPC-Check application as currently implemented at AMD SDC with Applied Materials CD-SEM tools.
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