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The drive of the semiconductor industry towards smaller and smaller features sizes requires more sophisticated correction methods to guarantee the final tolerances for the etched features in both wafer manufacturing and mask making. The wavelength gap in lithography and process effects as well as dependencies on the design content have led to the tremendous variety of resolution enhancement techniques and process correction approaches that are currently applied to a design on its path to manufacturing. As the 65nm nodes become production ready and the 45nm node shifts into the focus of the development effects like flare in wafer exposure, fogging effects in ebeam mask exposure and others that previously could be ignored are becoming significant so that their correction prior to manufacturing is required. That means additional correction steps are necessary to complete the data preparation. These put a larger burden on the data processing path and raise concerns over data volume and processing time limitations. Hierarchical processing methods have proven very effective in the past to keep data volumes and processing time in control.

The paper explores the design trends and the potential of hierarchical processing under the new circumstances. Extended data flows with a variety of correction steps are investigated. Experimental results that demonstrate the benefit of hierarchical methods in conjunction with parallel processing methods like multithreading and distributed processing are provided. The benefit of introducing more effective data formats like OASIS in these flows will be illustrated.