At GTC 2023, Nvidia announced its new cuLitho software library for speeding up a critical bottleneck in the semiconductor manufacturing workflow. The new library speeds computational lithography, a technique used to create photomasks for chip production. Nvidia claims its new approach enables 500 DGX H100 systems wielding 4,000 Hopper GPUs to do the same amount of work as 40,000 CPU-based servers, but do so 40X faster and with 9X less power. Nvidia claims this reduces the computational lithography workload to produce a photomask from several weeks down to eight hours.
Chipmaking leaders TSMC, ASML, and Synopsys have all signed on for the new tech, with Synopys already integrating it into its software design tools. Over time, Nvidia expects the new approach to enable higher chip density and yield, better design rules, and AI-powered lithography.
Nvidia scientists created new algorithms that allow increasingly-complex computational lithography workflows to execute on GPUs in parallel, exhibiting a 40X speedup using Hopper GPUs. The new algorithms are integrated into a new cuLitho acceleration library that can be integrated into mask makers' software (typically a foundry or a chip designer). The cuLitho acceleration library is also compatible with Ampere and Volta GPUs, though Hopper is the fastest solution.
