ACCURATE PROCESS HOTSPOT DETECTION USING CRITICAL DESIGN RULE EXTRACTION

An accurate process hotspot detection technique based on DRC is provided. In this technique, critical DRC rules can be extracted from a pattern. This extraction can include generating horizontal tiles and vertical tiles in the pattern, and adding directed edges to indicate relations between adjacent tiles in the pattern. Rule rectangles, which can also be generated during the critical DRC rule extraction, describe polygon placement in the pattern with a minimal number of critical DRC rules. The extracted DRC rules can be included in a DRC runset file. DRC can be performed with the DRC runset file on a layout. The DRC results can be filtered using the rule rectangles to identify potential hotspots and to verify actual hotspots.