A new technical paper, “MorphOPC: Advancing Mask Optimization with Multi-scale Hierarchical Morphological Learning,” was published by researchers at University at Buffalo, Villanova University, and IBM T. J. Watson Research Center.
Abstract
“As feature sizes shrink to the nanometer scale, accurately transferring circuit patterns from photomasks to silicon wafers becomes increasingly challenging. Optical proximity correction (OPC) is widely used to ensure pattern fidelity and manufacturability. Recent generative mask optimization models based on encoder-decoder architecture can synthesize near-optimal masks, serving as fast machine learning (ML) surrogates for traditional OPC. However, these models often fail to capture the geometric transformations from target layouts to mask patterns, leading to suboptimal quality. In this work, we formulate mask generation as a sequence of morphological operations on local layout features and propose MorphOPC, a multi-scale hierarchical model with neural morphological modules to learn these transformations. Experiments on edge-based OPC and ILT benchmarks across metal and via layers show that MorphOPC consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving higher printing fidelity and lower manufacturing cost, demonstrating strong potential for scalable mask optimization.”
Find the technical paper here. April 2026.
Hu, Yuting, Lei Zhuang, Chen Wang, Ruiyang Qin, Hua Xiang, Gi-joon Nam, and Jinjun Xiong. “MorphOPC: Advancing Mask Optimization with Multi-scale Hierarchical Morphological Learning.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.12528 (2026).
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