Abstract
As the technology of manufacturing process continues to advance, the process variation becomes more and more serious in nanometer designs. Optical proximity correction (OPC) is employed to correct the process variation of the diffraction effect. To obtain the desired layout as early as possible, routers must have some changes to handle the optical effects to speed up the OPC time and to avoid the routing result that cannot be corrected by the OPC process. In this paper, we propose two practical OPC-aware maze routing problems and present how to enhance an existing maze routing algorithm to get an optimal algorithm for each problem. The experimental results are also given to demonstrate the effectiveness of these two enhanced algorithms. © 2005 IEEE.