GPU designer Nvidia announced the computational lithography library this time last year, saying that contract chip manufacturers TSMC and ASML were testing it out, alongside chip design tools company Synopsys.
Vivek Singh, Nvidia's VP of advanced technology, said, "A chip is made up of trillions of shapes, or rectangles, each one is so tiny that you can fit 1,000s of them across the width of a single human hair. And because these things are so tiny, you need a $300 million camera to transfer that chip design onto silicon - but even that fancy camera doesn't have the required resolution. So you need some additional tricks.”
He added, “Essentially, you have to solve an inverse math problem to trick light into printing the correct shapes. That calculation has quietly become the largest single computation workload in the entire semiconductor industry. It's called computational lithography. And this is especially true in the [extreme ultraviolet] EUV era."
Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang added: “Computational lithography is a cornerstone of chip manufacturing. Our work on cuLitho, in partnership with TSMC and Synopsys, applies accelerated computing and generative AI to open new frontiers for semiconductor scaling.”
