  In Directed Self Assembly (DSA), poor printing of guiding templates can cause
misassembly resulting in high defect probability. Therefore, hotspots should be
avoided in the choice of the DSA groups. Accordingly, Directed Self-Assembly
(DSA) technologies which use Multiple Patterning (MP) to print the guiding
templates need to be aware of hotspots during the DSA grouping and MP
Decomposition. In this paper, we present a hotspot-aware heuristic for DSA
grouping and MP decomposition. Results show that that the proposed heuristic
eliminates 78% of the hotspots and conflicts that result from using a
hotspot-unaware grouping and decomposition algorithm. In comparison to the
optimal solution using Integer Linear Programming, the proposed heuristic
results in ~24% more violations.
