PROCEEDINGS OF SPIE

SPIEDigitalLibrary.org/conference-proceedings-of-spie

Machine learning (ML)-guided OPC

using basis functions of polar Fourier
transform

Suhyeong Choi, Seongbo Shim, Youngsoo Shin

Suhyeong Choi, Seongbo Shim, Youngsoo Shin, "Machine learning (ML)-

guided OPC using basis functions of polar Fourier transform," Proc. SPIE
9780, Optical Microlithography XXIX, 97800H (15 March 2016); doi:
10.1117/12.2219073

Event: SPIE Advanced Lithography, 2016, San Jose, California, United States

Downloaded From: https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/conference-proceedings-of-spie on 16 May 2023 Terms of Use: https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/terms-of-use

 Machine Learning (ML)-Guided OPC Using Basis
Functions of Polar Fourier Transform
Suhyeong Choia , Seongbo Shimab , and Youngsoo Shina
a School of Electrical Engineering, KAIST, Daejeon 34141, Korea
b Samsung Electronics, Hwasung 18448, Korea

ABSTRACT
With shrinking feature size, runtime has become a limitation of model-based OPC (MB-OPC). A few
machine learning-guided OPC (ML-OPC) have been studied as candidates for next-generation OPC,
but they all employ too many parameters (e.g. local densities), which set their own limitations. We
propose to use basis functions of polar Fourier transform (PFT) as parameters of ML-OPC. Since
PFT functions are orthogonal each other and well reflect light phenomena, the number of parameters
can significantly be reduced without loss of OPC accuracy. Experiments demonstrate that our new
ML-OPC achieves 80% reduction in OPC time and 35% reduction in the error of predicted mask bias
when compared to conventional ML-OPC.
Keyword: Optical proximity correction (OPC), polar Fourier transform, ML-OPC

1. INTRODUCTION
As layout feature size shrinks down, traditional MB-OPC becomes more time consuming. MB-OPC
iterates lithography simulation and mask image correction by inspecting simulation result. A lithogra-
phy simulation takes longer time due to denser polygons, larger ambit, and more kernels. In addition,
smaller feature size requires more iterations of lithography simulations to achieve more accurate OPC
result. In metal 1 layer of logic devices in modern technology, for instance, runtime of MB-OPC is
about 180 times of that in 40nm technology.
Recently, ML-OPC has been proposed as a promising solution to overcome the limitation of MB-
OPC. In ML-OPC, a segment of interest (and its surroundings) is represented by some parameters,
e.g. local pattern densities measured around the segment, which are arranged as a vector as shown in
Figure 1(a). The vector becomes an input of ML-OPC model that outputs a desired mask bias of the
segment, which is then used to synthesize a mask image as shown in Figure 1(b). ML-OPC model is
trained in advance using many test segments, so that a variety of layout patterns can all be corrected.
The method of model training and the choice of parameters are important in the accuracy and
runtime of ML-OPC. A few existing studies adopt hierarchical Bayesian model (HBM),1 multi-layer
perceptron (MLP),2 and support vector regression (SVR)3 for model training. They use local pattern
densities or pixel values of rasterized layout as parameters., but the number of parameters is typically
very large (e.g. some hundreds), which negatively affects runtime as well as accuracy.
We propose to use polar Fourier transform (PFT) signals as parameters of ML-OPC. A PFT signal
is obtained by multiplying a PFT basis function with layout image near a segment of interest. Due
to orthogonality of PFT basis functions, the PFT signals have little redundancy which allows us to
reduce the number of parameters. Reduced number of parameters also helps in accuracy provided that

Optical Microlithography XXIX, edited by Andreas Erdmann and Jongwook Kye, Proc. of SPIE
Vol. 9780, 97800H · © 2016 SPIE · CCC code: 0277-786X/16/$18 · doi: 10.1117/12.2219073

Proc. of SPIE Vol. 9780 97800H-1

Downloaded From: https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/conference-proceedings-of-spie on 16 May 2023
Terms of Use: https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/terms-of-use
 Segment of interest Mask image
Layout

ML-OPC Mask

model bias

            

(a) (b)

Figure 1. (a) Parameterization and (b) mask bias prediction in ML-OPC.

Region of density
Binary pixel values measurement Measurment point

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1
0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0
0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

(a) (b)

Figure 2. Parameters of conventional ML-OPC: (a) binary pixel value and (b) local pattern density.

unnecessarily large number of parameters in the conventional approach often causes overfitting that
negatively affects accuracy.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we review previous works of
ML-OPC. Our proposed ML-OPC is presented in Section 3, in which we study PFT signals and their
application for new ML-OPC. In Section 4, we conduct experiments to assess new ML-OPC in the
number of parameters and accuracy, and to investigate the impact of illumination complexity and
design types on new ML-OPC. Section 5 summarizes this paper.

2. PREVIOUS WORKS OF ML-OPC

Popular parameters of ML-OPC are pixel values of a rasterized layout. As shown in Figure 2(a), a
local layout with its center of the segment of interest is extracted and rasterized; if more than half of
pixel area is overlapped with layout, 1 is assigned to the pixel and, otherwise, 0 is assigned. As layout

Proc. of SPIE Vol. 9780 97800H-2

Downloaded From: https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/conference-proceedings-of-spie on 16 May 2023
Terms of Use: https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/terms-of-use
 n=4
3 2
1

Figure 3. Bessel function.

size increases and pixel size decreases, the number of parameters drastically increases; this increases
OPC runtime and often causes overfitting due to many unnecessary parameters. Small layout with
large pixels, on the other hand, yields small number of parameters, but it causes loss of geometry
information, thereby resulting in inaccurate OPC result.
Another popular parameters are local pattern densities .1 As shown in Figure 2(b), a few concentric
circles with their auxiliary lines are drawn around the segment of interest. At each point where the
circles and lines intersect (measurement point), a pattern density within local region (region of density
measurement) is measured. The number of parameters is determined by the numbers of the concentric
circles and lines that are used. Since measurement positions are rather sparsely distributed, the number
of parameters is smaller than that of the pixel value parameters.
In both methods, the region where parameters are extracted is usually smaller than optical influence
range, a circular region of about 1µm radius. If we expand the region for the benefit of accuracy so that
we extract parameters within optical influence range, the number of parameters becomes unrealistic,
e.g. 32 times in pixel value parameters and twice in local density parameters.

3. PROPOSED ML-OPC
3.1 PFT Signal
PFT decomposes a spatial distribution of light using PFT basis functions. It is popular in modeling
optical diffraction and interference. PFT basis function is given by

Ψnm (r, ϕ) = Jn (r)cos(mϕ), (1)

where Jn is n-th Bessel function as shown in Figure 3, which is a radial component of a PFT basis
function; n corresponds to the number of critical points along the radial direction. The angular
component of PFT basis function is represented by a cosine function∗ , where ϕ is angle and m is the
number of periods along the angular direction. PFT basis function becomes more complex as n and
m increase as shown in Figure 4. Note that PFT basis functions are orthogonal each other due to the
orthogonality of Bessel functions and cosine functions.
∗
A complete form of Bessel function is Ψnm (r, ϕ) = Jn (r)eimϕ , but we only consider a real part in this paper.

Proc. of SPIE Vol. 9780 97800H-3

Downloaded From: https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/conference-proceedings-of-spie on 16 May 2023
Terms of Use: https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/terms-of-use
 ...
30 21 12 14 23 16

Figure 4. Some basis functions of PFT.

Layout (L) PFT basis function ( )

Segment of interest

Figure 5. PFT signal

A PFT signal is now given by

X
φnm = Ψnm (x, y)L(x, y), (2)
∀(x,y)

where L(x, y) is a binary function whose value is 1 if (x, y) is within a layout polygon and 0 otherwise,
thereby representing a layout image around the segment of interest; the center of Ψnm is assumed
at the segment as shown in Figure 5; note that PFT basis function is now represented in Cartesian
coordinate. PFT signal as expressed by (2) is sum of Ψnm (x, y) values within layout polygon region,
which is associated with the amount of light interference at the center of the segment due to its
surroundings.
There are three benefits if we use PFT signals as parameters of ML-OPC.

• Efficiency: PFT basis functions are orthogonal. Therefore, there is little redundancy in cor-
responding PFT signals, implying that smaller number of parameters (compared to using local
pattern densities or pixel values) can be used without loss of accuracy.

• Ease of implementation: A commercial OPC package4, 5 usually has internal optical simulator,
which uses PFT basis functions. This allows us to implement our method on top of commercial
OPC tool with ease.

• Accuracy: PFT basis functions are widely used to model optical diffraction and interference5, 6
because a light on a wafer is concentrically distributed due to the circular scanner optics. A mask

Proc. of SPIE Vol. 9780 97800H-4

Downloaded From: https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/conference-proceedings-of-spie on 16 May 2023
Terms of Use: https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/terms-of-use
 1 0 0

0 1 1

Output node

1 1 1

Input nodes Hidden layers

Figure 6. MLP network.

bias is determined by optical characteristic, so using PFT basis functions should offer higher
accuracy of OPC.

3.2 Construction of ML-OPC Model

PFT signals obtained from each segment are arranged as a vector, which is submitted to ML-OPC
model. We employ multi-layer perceptron (MLP) to build our ML-OPC model. MLP consists of a few
layers containing some nodes (neurons), and nodes in the adjacent layers are fully connected by edges
(synapses) as shown in Figure 6. MLP maps the input vector to one output scalar, which is a predicted
mask bias. Each element of the vector is assigned to input nodes one by one, and propagated to every
node in the next hidden layer. A node in the hidden layer receives multiple signals from every node
in previous layer via connected edges; while edge carries a signal, the signal is multiplied by the edge
weight. If summation of received signals at a node is larger than some threshold, the node outputs 1,
otherwise, it outputs 0. Similarly, the output values from nodes of the first hidden layer are propagated
through some subsequent hidden layers to the output node, which in turn has a scalar.
Mask bias is more accurately predicted if weights and threshold in each node are appropriately
adjusted in advance. Sample segments are extracted from test layouts, and each sample is associated
with a vector of PFT signals and predicted mask bias result from MB-OPC. MLP predicts mask bias
once the vector is applied, and the difference of mask bias from MB-OPC and ML-OPC is defined as
an error. Cost function is a sum of squared errors for all segments used in training process. Gradient
descent method is applied to minimize the cost function by adjusting edge weights and threshold; the
function is differentiable if thresholding is done by using sigmoid or tanh function. The numbers of
layers and neurons in each layer are determined in empirical fashion.

Proc. of SPIE Vol. 9780 97800H-5

Downloaded From: https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/conference-proceedings-of-spie on 16 May 2023
Terms of Use: https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/terms-of-use
 80 5.4

3.5

# Parameters

RMSE [nm]
10

Density PFT Density PFT

(a) (b)

Figure 7. (a) The number of parameters and (b) RMSE of conventional and new ML-OPC.

4. EXPERIMENTS
We implemented our new ML-OPC using commercial OPC package (Progen and Proteus4, 5 ) for PFT
signal computation and Python for MLP construction. We assumed ArF immersion lithography
(1.2NA) with annular illumination, which corresponds to optical influence range of about 1µm. Our
MLP consists of 3 hidden layers, each of which contains 10 nodes. The MLP was trained for 20,000
segments extracted from metal 1 layouts in 20nm logic technology. Other test layouts that contain
about 2 million segments were prepared for testing the trained MLP.

4.1 Assessment of New Parameters

We also implemented a standard ML-OPC, which uses local pattern densities, as a reference of com-
parison. It uses 80 local pattern densities as parameters, which can be compared to only 10 parameters
in our ML-OPC as illustrated in Figure 7(a). Runtime of MLP construction is reduced by 26% in our
ML-OPC due to smaller number of parameters. There is even larger reduction of runtime in actual
OPC, by 80%.
The accuracy of ML-OPC is assessed by using root mean square error (RMSE) of predicted mask
bias, with mask bias from MB-OPC as a reference. As shown in Figure 7(b), new ML-OPC achieves
3.5nm RMSE, which is 1.9nm smaller than that of standard one, even though smaller number of
parameters are used. This is due to less overfitting that occurs in our ML-OPC.

4.2 Illumination Complexity

Optical proximity effect is affected by illumination types. To investigate the impact of illumination
complexity on new ML-OPC, we performed the same experiment assuming cross-pole illumination. As
shown in Figure 8, RMSE increases to 3.9nm, because of increased complexity of cross-pole (compared
to basic annular), which causes more complex optical proximity effects. We tried to reduce RMSE to
3.5nm, the same quantity if annular illumination is assumed, which required 3 more PFT signals.

4.3 Layer and Device

We tried our ML-OPC using metal 1 and contact layouts. Metal 1 causes larger RMSE as shown in
Figure 9(a) since its layout is typically more complex than contact layout. For the same reason, our
ML-OPC causes larger RMSE in logic devices than in memory devices as shown in Figure 9(b).

Proc. of SPIE Vol. 9780 97800H-6

Downloaded From: https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/conference-proceedings-of-spie on 16 May 2023
Terms of Use: https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/terms-of-use
 Annular Cross-pole

3.9
3.5 3.5
RMSE [nm]

Result of
Figure 8(b)

10 10 13
Number of PFT signals

Figure 8. RMSE of new ML-OPC with different illumination type.

Result of Figure 8(b)

3.5 3.5
RMSE [nm]

RMSE [nm]

2.1
1.7

Metal1 Contact Logic Memory

(a) (b)

Figure 9. RMSE of new ML-OPC with different design type: layer and device.

5. CONCLUSION
In ML-OPC, the choice of parameters is very important in its accuracy as well as runtime. We
have proposed to use PFT signals as parameters. Since they are orthogonal while they model light
interference very well, the number of parameters can significantly be reduced without loss of accuracy,
which has be demonstrated through experiments.

6. ACKNOWLEDGMENT
We would like to thank Mr. Junghoe Choi and Mr. Munhoe Do from Synopsys Korea for technical
support. This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded
by the Korea government (MSIP) (No. 2015R1A2A2A01008037).

Proc. of SPIE Vol. 9780 97800H-7

Downloaded From: https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/conference-proceedings-of-spie on 16 May 2023
Terms of Use: https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/terms-of-use
 REFERENCES
1. T. Matsunawa, B. Yu, and D. Z. Pan, “Optical proximity correction with hierarchical Bayes model,” in SPIE
Advanced Lithography, Mar 2015, pp. 1–10.
2. R. Luo, “Optical proximity correction using a multilayer perceptron neural network,” Journal of Optics,
vol. 15, no. 7, pp. 075 708–075 713, Jun 2013.
3. K.-S. Luo, Z. Shi, X.-L. Yan, and Z. Geng, “SVM based layout retargeting for fast and regularized inverse
lithography,” Journal of Zhejiang University SCIENCE C, vol. 15, no. 5, pp. 390–400, Apr 2014.
4. Synopsys, “Proteus,” Dec. 2013.
5. ——, “Progen,” Dec. 2013.
6. M. Born and E. Wolf, Principles to Optics, 4th ed. Pergamon Press, 1970.

Proc. of SPIE Vol. 9780 97800H-8

Downloaded From: https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/conference-proceedings-of-spie on 16 May 2023
Terms of Use: https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/terms-of-use