A method and system for performing optical proximity correction (OPC) on an integrated
circuit (IC) chip design is disclosed. The system and method of the present invention
includes exploding calls on an element list to generate an expanded element list,
defining a local cover area for each call on the expanded element list, classifying
congruent local cover areas into corresponding groups, and performing an OPC procedure
for one local cover area in each group By defining the local cover area for each
call and grouping congruent local cover areas, only one OPC procedure (e.g., evaluation
and correction) needs to be performed per group of congruent local cover areas.
The amount of data to be evaluated and the number of corrections performed is greatly
reduced because OPC is not performed on repetitive portions of the IC chip design,
thereby resulting in significant savings in computing resources and time.
