Multi-Row Guiding Template Design for Lamellar Directed Self-Assembly with Self-Aligned Via Process

Directed self-assembly (DSA) of block copolymers can generate tiny and dense layout features, holding great potential for patterning vias and contacts at advanced nodes. Existing studies mainly focused on guiding template design for cylindrical DSA, but by leveraging self-aligned via process, lamellar DSA can form vias to be immune to placement errors and free of a uniform pitch between vias, which cylindrical DSA suffers from. The state-of-the-art guiding template design for lamellar DSA can handle only single-row templates, thus limiting the flexibility of via grouping. Therefore, in this article, we explore further and propose a novel and general multi-row guiding template design approach. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art work on both mask conflicts and short guiding templates, and requires much less computation time.