Full-wave-guided optical proximity correction for semiconductor lithography

Background. As lithography process nodes shrink, wave effects intensify and the features printed on the wafer no longer match the designed mask patterns. Optical proximity correction (OPC) compensates by modifying the mask pattern, but current OPC uses rigorous full-wave simulations for only a small number of representative patterns and therefore does not fully capture the nonlinear interaction between light and the mask.

Objective. Make OPC that is completely guided by full-wave simulation efficient enough for practical semiconductor manufacturing.

Approach. We use the distorted Born approximation to build an outer–inner loop structure: full-wave simulations are performed only in the outer loop, and their results are reused repeatedly in the inner loop. Linearizing the scattering process also alleviates the nonlinearity of the optimization and gives more robust convergence.

Main results. The approach significantly improves the efficiency and accuracy of OPC, making full-wave-guided lithography correction feasible for practical semiconductor manufacturing.

Significance. This work is carried out through the Consortium for Electromagnetic Technologies with industry partners. Our long-term goal is full-wave simulation and mask optimization of circuits approaching a thousand wavelengths on a single compute node.

Publications.

Z. Jia (PD), L. J. Gomez, W. C. Chew, A. Peng, and R. Goossens, "Efficient Fullwave-Guided Optical Proximity Correction," AIP Advances, vol. 16, no. 9, 2026. link

Z. Jia (PD), L. J. Gomez, W. C. Chew, A. Peng, and R. Goossens, "Fullwave-Guided Optical Proximity Correction Based on Distorted Born Iterative Method," IEEE International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation and USNC-URSI Radio Science Meeting, July 2025.

Z. Jia (PD), L. J. Gomez, W. C. Chew, A. Peng, and R. Goossens, "A Novel Fullwave-Guided Optical Proximity Correction System Based on Distorted Born Iterative Method," International Applied Computational Electromagnetics Society Symposium, May 2025.