  This article investigates the weak approximation towards the invariant measure of semi-linear stochastic differential equations (SDEs) under non-globally Lipschitz coefficients. For this purpose, we propose a linear-theta-projected Euler (LTPE) scheme, which also admits an invariant measure, to handle the potential influence of the linear stiffness. Under certain assumptions, both the SDE and the corresponding LTPE method are shown to converge exponentially to the underlying invariant measures, respectively. Moreover, with time-independent regularity estimates for the corresponding Kolmogorov equation, the weak error between the numerical invariant measure and the original one can be guaranteed with convergence of order one. In terms of computational complexity, the proposed ergodicity preserving scheme with the nonlinearity explicitly treated has a significant advantage over the ergodicity preserving implicit Euler method in the literature. Numerical experiments are provided to verify our theoretical findings. 
Linear implicit approximations of invariant measures of semi-linear SDEs   with non-globally Lipschitz coefficients