Methods and systems for registering images for electronic designs

1. A method for training a convolutional neural network to register images for masks or wafers in semiconductor manufacturing, the method comprising:

inputting a first pair of images aligned in a first modality and a second pair of images aligned in a second modality, wherein images in the first pair of images and the second pair of images are a computer aided design (CAD) image pre-aligned with a scanning electron microscope (SEM) image; and

generating an affine transformation with a convolutional neural network, using one image from the first pair of images and one image from the second pair of images, wherein the one image from the first pair of images is in the first modality and the one image from the second pair of images is in the second modality.

2. The method of claim 1 , further comprising:

registering the second pair of images with the affine transformation; and

verifying the registering of the second pair of images against the first pair of images using normalized cross correlation (NCC) loss.

3. The method of claim 2 , wherein the convolutional neural network comprises an encoder with a kernel comprising weights, and wherein the weights are adjusted based on the NCC loss.

4. The method of claim 2 , wherein the first pair of images and the second pair of images each comprise a CAD image and a SEM image.

5. The method of claim 4 , wherein:

the one image from the second pair of images is a CAD image;

the affine transformation is applied only on the CAD image of the second pair of images; and

the NCC loss is calculated with only the CAD image of the first pair of images and the CAD image of the second pair of images after affine transformation.

6. The method of claim 4 , wherein the CAD image of the first pair of images and the second pair of images has been created using lithography simulation.

7. The method of claim 6 , wherein the first pair of images and the second pair of images have been synthesized using a digital twin using affine transformation.

8. The method of claim 1 , wherein the convolutional neural network further comprises a fully connected layer and an initialization of the affine transformation.

9. The method of claim 1 , wherein the affine transformation consists of only scaling, translation and rotation.

10. The method of claim 1 , wherein a pair of patches is taken from the first pair of images and the second pair of images; wherein the affine transformation is applied to the second pair of images.

11. The method of claim 10 , wherein the pair of patches has a size that is smaller than the first pair of images and the second pair of images.

12. A method for registering images for masks or wafers in semiconductor manufacturing, the method comprising:

inputting a pair of images, wherein the pair of images comprises a computer aided design (CAD) image and a scanning electron microscope (SEM) image; and

registering the CAD image to the SEM image, using a trained convolutional neural network that has been trained with a first pair of CAD and SEM images pre-aligned in a first modality and a second pair of CAD and SEM images pre-aligned in a second modality, wherein the trained convolutional neural network comprises an affine transformation using one image from the first pair of images and one image from the second pair of images.

13. The method of claim 12 , wherein the trained convolutional neural network further comprises a fully connected layer and an initialization of the affine transformation.

14. The method of claim 12 , wherein the trained convolutional neural network further comprises an encoder, and a kernel size of 4×4 with channels varying from 32, 64, 128, 256 and 512 for each convolution layer in the encoder.

15. The method of claim 12 , wherein the CAD image is created using lithography simulation.