OPC

Opening — Why this matters now AI has officially entered semiconductor manufacturing—again. And once again, the promise is speed: faster mask optimization, fewer simulations, lower cost. Yet beneath the marketing gloss lies an inconvenient truth. Most AI models for optical proximity correction (OPC) and inverse lithography technique (ILT) have been trained on data that barely resembles real chips. Synthetic layouts. Isolated tiles. Zero awareness of standard-cell hierarchy. No real notion of context. ...