Flare reduction in EUV Lithography by perturbation of wire segments

With growing demand for complex and high density integrated chips (IC), optical lithography with 193 nm immersion technology has become a bottleneck in the chip manufacturing industry. IC fabrication industry is looking forward to next generation lithography methods, for example, Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography (EUVL). While EUVL is capable of printing with a wavelength of 13.5 nm, it suffers from a major drawback called flare, due to the scattering of light on blank surfaces. Large flare and/or its large variation cause critical dimension (CD) violations. In this paper, we propose an Integer Linear Programming based method to mitigate the effects of flare in the post routing step through perturbation of wire segments. Experimental results on a set of synthetic circuits show significant reduction of flare and its standard deviation across the chip surface.