NVIDIA today announced a breakthrough that brings accelerated computing to the field of computational lithography, enabling semiconductor leaders like ASML, TSMC and Synopsys to accelerate the design and manufacturing of next-generation chips, just as current production processes are nearing the limits of what physics makes possible.
The new NVIDIA cuLitho software library for computational lithography is being integrated by TSMC, the world's leading foundry, as well as electronic design automation leader Synopsys into their software, manufacturing processes and systems for the latest-generation NVIDIA Hopper architecture GPUs. Equipment maker ASML is working closely with NVIDIA on GPUs and cuLitho, and is planning to integrate support for GPUs into all of its computational lithography software products.
The advance will enable chips with tinier transistors and wires than is now achievable, while accelerating time to market and boosting energy efficiency of the massive data centers that run 24/7 to drive the manufacturing process.
"The chip industry is the foundation of nearly every other industry in the world," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. "With lithography at the limits of physics, NVIDIA's introduction of cuLitho and collaboration with our partners TSMC, ASML and Synopsys allows fabs to increase throughput, reduce their carbon footprint and set the foundation for 2nm and beyond."
Running on GPUs, cuLitho delivers a performance leap of up to 40x beyond current lithography — the process of creating patterns on a silicon wafer — accelerating the massive computational workloads that currently consume tens of billions of CPU hours every year.
It enables 500 NVIDIA DGX H100 systems to achieve the work of 40,000 CPU systems, running all parts of the computational lithography process in parallel, helping reduce power needs and potential environmental impact.
In the near term, fabs using cuLitho could help produce each day 3-5x more photomasks — the templates for a chip's design — using 9x less power than current configurations. A photomask that required two weeks can now be processed overnight.
Longer term, cuLitho will enable better design rules, higher density, higher yields and AI-powered lithography.