Fast detection of novel problematic patterns based on dictionary learning and prediction of their lithographic difficulty

Assessing pattern printability in new large layouts faces important challenges of runtime and false detection. Lithographic simulation tools and classification techniques do not scale well. We propose a fast pattern detection method by learning an overcomplete basis representing each reference pattern. A pattern from a new design is detected “novel” if its reconstruction error, when coded in the learned basis, is large. We show high speedup (1000x) compared to nearest neighbor search. A new boundary detection technique selects the minimal set of the novel patterns to predict problematic patterns; 14.93% of the novel patterns suffice to predict ORC hotspots, while 53.77% are needed using traditional methods.