A CPU-century Worth of Calculations or More
The computational effort behind these methods is immense. According to one estimate, the calculations required to adjust OPC geometries to take into account variations to focus and exposure for a state-of-the-art integrated circuit will take approximately 100 CPU-years of computer time. This does not include modeling the 3D polarization of the light source or any of the several other systems that will to be modeled in production computational photolithographic mask making flows. Brion Technologies, a subsidiary of ASML, the largest manufacturer of photolithography systems, markets a rack-mounted hardware accelerator dedicated for use in making computational lithographic calculations — a mask-making shop can purchase a large number of their systems to run in parallel. Others have claimed significant acceleration using re-purposed off-the-shelf graphics cards for their high parallel throughput.
Read more about this topic: Computational Lithography
Famous quotes containing the words worth and/or calculations:
“Is discord going to show itself while we are still fighting, is the Jew once again worth less than another? Oh, it is sad, very sad, that once more, for the umpteenth time, the old truth is confirmed: “What one Christian does is his own responsibility, what one Jew does is thrown back at all Jews.””
—Anne Frank (1929–1945)
“He who is conversant with the supernal powers will not worship these inferior deities of the wind, waves, tide, and sunshine. But we would not disparage the importance of such calculations as we have described. They are truths in physics because they are true in ethics.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)