Optical proximity correction (OPC) is a key step in modern integrated circuit (IC) manufacturing. The quality of model-based OPC (MB-OPC) is directly determined by segment offsets after OPC processing. However

in conventional MB-OPC

the intensity of a control site is adjusted only by the movement of its corresponding segment; this scheme is no longer accurate enough as the lithography process advances. On the other hand

matrix MB-OPC is too time-consuming to become practical. In this paper

we propose a new sparse matrix MB-OPC algorithm with model-based mapping between segments and control sites. We put forward the concept of ‘sensitive area’. When the Jacobian matrix used in the matrix MB-OPC is evaluated

only the elements that correspond to the segments in the sensitive area of every control site need to be calculated

while the others can be set to 0. The new algorithm can effectively improve the sparsity of the Jacobian matrix

and hence reduce the computations. Both theoretical analysis and experiments show that the sparse matrix MB-OPC with model-based mapping is more accurate than conventional MB-OPC

and much faster than matrix MB-OPC while maintaining high accuracy.