VPEvolve: A Self-Evolving Virtual Process Engineer for Computational Lithography

Tianyi Li, Wenxuan Dong, Donger Luo, Nan Wang, Yanpeng Chen +3

Optical proximity correction (OPC) recipes grow as engineers add local rules to repair newly discovered lithography hotspots. Each correction can interact with existing rules, while lessons from commercial-tool trials remain scattered across code and logs. \system combines a Virtual Process Engineer (VPE) harness with a Skill Bank of measured engineering experience. The harness equips a frozen language model with process manuals, layout analysis, recipe editing, and commercial-tool evaluation. The actor proposes changes to the global parameters, local targeted rules, or diagnostic trials. After each evaluation, an LLM reflector and curator turn the measured response into evidence-linked judgments. The actor retrieves them before its next trial. Feasible improvements update the retained recipe; every measured trial informs the Skill Bank that guides the next edit. The model weights remain fixed. On a FreePDK45-derived benchmark with ten commercial-tool evaluations per case, \system reduces the mean per-case maximum edge placement error from 18.294 to 5.361 nm on Poly and from 22.052 to 15.692 nm on Metal1. Every final recipe satisfies the predefined quality constraints and…