Physics-Informed Neural Systems for the Simulation of EUV Electromagnetic Wave Diffraction from a Lithography Mask
This provides an efficient solution for accelerating design and optimization workflows in next-generation lithography, addressing a domain-specific problem in semiconductor manufacturing.
The paper tackled simulating EUV electromagnetic wave diffraction from lithography masks by introducing a hybrid Waveguide Neural Operator (WGNO) that combines a waveguide method with neural networks, achieving competitive accuracy and significantly reduced prediction times, with WGNO reaching state-of-the-art performance.
Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) and neural operators (NOs) for solving the problem of diffraction of Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) electromagnetic waves from contemporary lithography masks are presented. A novel hybrid Waveguide Neural Operator (WGNO) is introduced, based on a waveguide method with its most computationally expensive components replaced by a neural network. To evaluate performance, the accuracy and inference time of PINNs and NOs are compared against modern numerical solvers for a series of problems with known exact solutions. The emphasis is placed on investigation of solution accuracy by considered artificial neural systems for 13.5 nm and 11.2 nm wavelengths. Numerical experiments on realistic 2D and 3D masks demonstrate that PINNs and neural operators achieve competitive accuracy and significantly reduced prediction times, with the proposed WGNO architecture reaching state-of-the-art performance. The presented neural operator has pronounced generalizing properties, meaning that for unseen problem parameters it delivers a solution accuracy close to that for parameters seen in the training dataset. These results provide a highly efficient solution for accelerating the design and optimization workflows of next-generation lithography masks.