EMOGen: Enhancing Mask Optimization via Pattern Generation

Layout pattern generation via deep generative models is a promising methodology for building practical large-scale pattern libraries. However, although improving optical proximity correction (OPC) is a major target of existing pattern generation methods, they are not explicitly trained for OPC and integrated into OPC methods. In this paper, we propose EMOGen to enable the co-evolution of layout pattern generation and learning-based OPC methods. With the novel co-evolution methodology, we achieve up to 39% enhancement in OPC and 34% improvement in pattern legalization.