— Double patterning technology (DPT) is a most likely lithography solution for 32/22nm technology nodes as of 2008 due to the delay of Extreme Ultra Violet lithography. However, it should hurdle two challenges before being introduced to mass production, layout decomposition and overlay error. In this paper, we present the first detailed routing algorithm for DPT to improve layout decomposability and robustness against overlay error, by minimizing indecomposable wirelength and the number of stitches. Experimental results show that the proposed approach improves the quality of layout significantly in terms of decomposability and the number of stitches with 3.6x speedup, compared with a current industrial DPT design flow.
Minsik Cho, Yongchan Ban, David Z. Pan