Computational Lithography - A CPU-century Worth of Calculations or More

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.