Gauda harnesses graphical processor units for OPC

摘要

Have you ever wished that computational lithography could be more like a video game? Gauda, a Sunnyvale, CA, startup that decloaked at the SPIE Advanced Lithography Symposium, is offering to make it so, at least for optical proximity correction and verification (OPC and OPV). The idea, explained founder, president and CEO Ahmet Karakas in an interview with SST, is to use the graphical processor units (GPUs) in commodity desktop PCs to do the heavy lifting for litho simulation, just as they do for videogame graphics. While some tasks (i.e., full-chip OPV) will run fast enough with Gauda software on one PC, a simple Ethernet connection enables operation of a cluster. Ten Ethernet connected commodity PCs with GPUs can do OPC decoration as fast as the industry-leading system with its FPGA-based hardware acceleration, he said. When there is no computational engineering to do, the cluster can revert to its usual role, running business software and videogames.