Voronoi Diagram Based Heterogeneous Circuit Layout Centerline Extraction for Mask Verification

Modern circuit layout centerline extraction is an essential step in estimating the parasitic inductance and verifying the layout performance in mask verification. As the continued feature size shrinking and the complexity of modern circuit design keeps growing, heterogeneous layout centerline extraction has become even more challenging. In this paper, we first formulate a Voronoi diagram-based problem transformation to collect all centerline points. Then, a graph-based initial centerline generation algorithm is presented to handle all invalid centerline points effectively. Finally, a heterogeneity-aware centerline optimization method is proposed to generate optimized design-violation-free centerline results for irregular structures. Compared with the state-of-the-art commercial 3D-RC parasitic parameter extraction tool RCExplorer and the 1st place in the 2019 EDA Elite Challenge Contest, experimental results show that our algorithm achieves the best average precision ratio of 99.7% on centerline extraction while satisfying all design constraints.