MorphOPC: Advancing Mask Optimization with Multi-scale Hierarchical Morphological Learning

TL;DR

MorphOPC introduces a multi-scale hierarchical morphological learning model to improve mask optimization accuracy and efficiency in nanometer-scale photolithography.

Contribution

It formulates mask generation as morphological operations and develops neural modules to better capture geometric transformations, outperforming existing methods.

Findings

MorphOPC achieves higher printing fidelity.

It reduces manufacturing costs.

It outperforms state-of-the-art mask optimization methods.

Abstract

As feature sizes shrink to the nanometer scale, accurately transferring circuit patterns from photomasks to silicon wafers becomes increasingly challenging. Optical proximity correction (OPC) is widely used to ensure pattern fidelity and manufacturability. Recent generative mask optimization models based on encoder-decoder architecture can synthesize near-optimal masks, serving as fast machine learning (ML) surrogates for traditional OPC. However, these models often fail to capture the geometric transformations from target layouts to mask patterns, leading to suboptimal quality. In this work, we formulate mask generation as a sequence of morphological operations on local layout features and propose \textit{MorphOPC}, a multi-scale hierarchical model with neural morphological modules to learn these transformations. Experiments on edge-based OPC and ILT benchmarks across metal and via layers show that \textit{MorphOPC} consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving higher printing fidelity and lower manufacturing cost, demonstrating strong potential for scalable mask optimization.