High-performance hierarchical fracturing
Nicolas B. Cobb, Weidong Zhang · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2002
We describe in more detail a mask data preparation (MDP) flow previously proposed. The focus on this paper is a performance comparison of hierarchical fracturing techniques compared to standard fracturing. Our flow uses GDSII data as input, including a GDSII-based job deck description. The output is maximally compacted, trapezoidal mask writer (MW) formatted data. Our flow takes advantage of hierarchy explicit in the GDSII file(s). This allows optimal determination of 'cover cells', which are repeatable groups of patterns within the data. The use of cover cells allows a reduction of fracturing runtime. In one case, a 21 GB MEBES file was fractured in 30 hours using the standard technique and 53 minutes using the hierarchical cover cell technique.