Evaluation of OPC efficacy

In this paper, we introduce standard metrics for the evaluation of three common problems in lithography: 1-D linewidth variation, line-end pullback, and 2-D corner rounding. Metrics that indicate both the magnitude of the problem and the quality of the formed features are presented. These can be used with digitized scanning electron microscope images of features formed from masks with and without overall process correction (OPC) to numerically determine the efficacy of the OPC techniques. All metrics tend to 0 in the case of perfect pattern fidelity.