Lithography Hotspot Detection Method Based on Transfer Learning Using Pre-Trained Deep Convolutional Neural Network

As the designed feature size of integrated circuits (ICs) continues to shrink, the lithographic printability of the design has become one of the important issues in IC design and manufacturing. There are patterns that cause lithography hotspots in the IC layout. Hotspot detection affects the turn-around time and the yield of IC manufacturing. The precision and F1 score of available machine-learning-based hotspot-detection methods are still insufficient. In this paper, a lithography hotspot detection method based on transfer learning using pre-trained deep convolutional neural network is proposed. The proposed method uses the VGG13 network trained with the ImageNet dataset as the pre-trained model. In order to obtain a model suitable for hotspot detection, the pre-trained model is trained with some down-sampled layout pattern data and takes cross entropy as the loss function. ICCAD 2012 benchmark suite is used for model training and model verification. The proposed method performs well in accuracy, recall, precision, and F1 score. There is significant improvement in the precision and F1 score. The results show that updating the weights of partial convolutional layers has little effect on the results of this method.