Gauda announces breakthrough for accelerating OPC verification in 45nm and 32nm technology nodes
(Technology News, 28 Feb 2008 )
Gauda has demonstrated a breakthrough technology that can accelerate OPC (optical proximity correction) and OPV (optimal proximity verification) up to 200 times faster than similar products, running on today’s desktop computers. Gauda achieves this acceleration without any specialized hardware or FPGAs, but by developing a new breed of algorithms utilizing CPUs and GPUs (graphical processing units) that are traditionally used for gaming.
As design is moving to the 45nm and 32nm technology nodes, requisite computations increase by two to three times per year. Unfortunately, CPUs are not addressing this need, managing only a 30% increase in computation growth per year. To solve RET (resolution enhancement technologies) problems, the only current solution is to keep increasing the size of CPU clusters, which often number in the thousands. Tool vendors are at an inflection point where the time it takes to rewrite tools is lagging behind the changes in process nodes.
Fortunately, Gauda has anticipated this inflection point, realizing an attractive speed advantage for OPC using GPUs. Gauda engineers started by studying the available computational resources commonly found in typical desktop computers and optimized those resources to speed up the RET-related computations without sacrificing accuracy. >From the beginning, the company decided not to use any specialized hardware. With Gauda technology and approximately 10 all-commodity desktop computers, a large 45nm full-chip layout can be decorated overnight. Similarly, one single desktop computer is sufficient to complete the verification overnight.
