Elimination of lithographic hotspots which have been waived by means of pattern matching

A persistent problem in verification flows is to eliminate waivers defined as patterns that are known to be safe on silicon even though they are flagged by the verification recipes. The difficulty of the problem stems from the complexity of these patterns, and thus, using a standard verification language to describe them becomes very tedious and can deliver unexpected results. In addition, these patterns have a dynamic nature, hence, updating all production verification recipes to waive these non critical patterns becomes more time consuming. In this work, we are presenting a new method to eliminate waivers directly after verification recipes have been executed, where a new rule file will be generated automatically based on the type of errors under investigation. The core of the method is based on pattern matching to compare generated errors from verifications runs with a library of pattern waivers. This flow will eliminate the need to edit any production recipe, and complicated coding will not be required. Finally, this flow is compatible with most of the technology nodes.