An efficient way of automatic layout decomposition and pattern classification

As technology advances, chip size becomes larger and larger, this brings challenges when engineers would like to do a quick investigation of the design in a short time, like hotspot detection and layout fixing. An idea to mitigate the challenges is to decompose a layout into patterns and classify these patterns to unique ones. Engineers then prioritize their work on these unique patterns. Patterns from different products can be accumulated and recorded, when a new design comes in, the known patterns will be filtered out from all unique patterns seen in this new design. When the pattern database is large enough and contains enough safe and weak patterns, machine learning can be used to train the algorithm to predict hotspots in the new design. The key point is how to efficiently decompose a layout and group those patterns. This paper presents how to decompose a layout by using Calibre Pattern Matching and DRC. The experiment data shows that this is a very efficient way to decompose a layout automatically.