LithoWorld: An Endpoint World Model for Lithography Process-Window Recovery

Botong Zhao, Fang Yu, Xinyuan Chen, Yue Lu

Lithography process drift can move a fabricated pattern outside its process window, producing unqualified scanning electron microscopy (SEM) morphology. We present LithoWorld, an endpoint world model for SEM-guided parameter recovery. Interior representative targets jointly determine qualified reference appearance and correction supervision. A causal predictive branch aligns currentimage features with endpoint representations, while a conditional flow policy generates a two-dimensional correction as an action chunk. The model learns from 173 groups of measured SEMs organized as focus-exposure maps, preserving unmeasured cells as unknown. On 200 test pairs from the 73-group subset, LithoWorld achieves 88.5% qualified-region success and 46.0% interior success, exceeding the strongest comparison method by 2.5 and 6.0 percentage points, respectively. Ablations separate the effects of target selection, endpoint alignment, and output parameterization. Qualitative SEM retrieval illustrates recovery to qualified interiors without requiring exact reference-coordinate matching.