An efficient linear time triple patterning solver

Triple patterning lithography (TPL) has been recognized as one of the most promising techniques for 14/10nm technology node. In this paper, we applied triple patterning lithography on standard cell based designs, and proposed a novel algorithm to solve the problem. The algorithm guarantees to find a legal TPL decomposition with optimal number of stitches if one exists. A graph model is proposed to reduce the number of vertices in the solution graph, and a fast approach is developed to achieve simultaneous runtime and memory improvement. An efficient approach to limit the number of stitches is also proposed, which greatly reduces the total number of stitch candidates and enables an incremental implementation of the algorithm. Experimental results shows that the proposed algorithm is very efficient, which achieves 39.1% runtime improvement and 18.4% memory reduction compared with the state-of-the-art TPL algorithm on the same problem.