Mentor Graphics Corporation

Siemens Industry Software Gmbh

Huikan Liu

Nicolas Bailey Cobb

Konstantinos G Adam

A system may include a model calibration engine configured to determine a candidate lithography model set from which to calibrate a lithography model according to multiple objectives, including by initializing a population of parent candidate models, generating child candidate models, merging the parent and child candidate models into a merged population, classifying the candidate models of the merged population into tiers of non-dominated fronts according to respective objective functions for the multiple objectives, determining a subset of the merged population based on the classified tiers, and identifying, as the candidate lithography model set, a Pareto-optimal front of the subset of the merged population determined based on the classified tiers. The system may also include a model selection engine configured to set a given candidate lithography model in the candidate lithography model set as a calibrated lithography model for simulating a lithographic process.

Multi-objective calibrations of lithography models

A set of original model candidates are first divided into groups of original model candidates. Child model candidates are generated by performing crossover on each of the groups of original model candidates without mutation. From the original model candidates and the child model candidates, a set of new model candidates are derived, which includes: selecting a group of new model candidates from each group of the original model candidates and the corresponding child model candidates, selecting an additional new model candidate if adding the additional new model candidate increases overall diversity, and performing niche clearing to keep a number of the new model candidates in each of niches from exceeding a maximum number. The dividing, generating and deriving operations are then iterated. Model caching may be performed by restricting the crossover to the model term level or above.

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Huikan Liu