LithoGAN: End-to-End Lithography Modeling with Generative Adversarial Networks

Lithography simulation is one of the most fundamental steps in process modeling and physical verification. Conventional simulation methods suffer from a tremendous computational cost for achieving high accuracy. Recently, machine learning was introduced to trade off between accuracy and runtime through speeding up the resist modeling stage of the simulation flow. In this work, we propose LithoGAN, an end-to-end lithography modeling framework based on a generative adversarial network (GAN), to map the input mask patterns directly to the output resist patterns. Our experimental results show that LithoGAN can predict resist patterns with high accuracy while achieving orders of magnitude speedup compared to conventional lithography simulation and previous machine learning based approach.