Modeling Metrology for Calibration of OPC Models

Optical Proximity Correction (OPC) has continually improved in accuracy over the years by adding more physically based models. Here, we further extend OPC modeling by adding the Analytical Linescan Model (ALM) to account for systematic biases in CD-SEM metrology. The ALM was added to a conventional OPC model calibration flow and the accuracy of the calibrated model with the ALM was compared to the standard model without the ALM using validation data. Without using any adjustable parameters in the ALM, OPC validation accuracy was improved by 5%. While very preliminary, these results give hope that modeling metrology could be an important next step in OPC model improvement.