Fast approximation of transfer cross coefficient for optical proximity correction

Model Based Optical Proximity Correction (MBOPC) is since a decade a widely used technique that permits to achieve resolutions on silicon layout smaller than the wavelength used in commercially-available photolithography tools. This is an important point, because patterns dimensions on masks are continuously shrinking. Commonly-used algorithms, involving Transfer Cross Coefficients (TCC) drawn from Hopkins formulation to compute aerial images during MBOPC treatment are based on TCC decomposition into its eigenvectors using matricization and the well known Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) tool. This technique remains highly runtime consuming. We propose in this paper to extend a fast fixed point algorithm to estimate an a priori fixed number of leading eigenvectors required to obtain a good approximation while ensuring a low information loss for computing aerial images.