NVIDIA, ASML, TSMC, and Synopsys have joined forces to set the foundation for next-generation chip manufacturing. The collaboration is centered around NVIDIA’s breakthrough in computational lithography, which brings accelerated computing to the field, enabling these industry leaders to expedite the design and manufacturing of next-generation chips.
NVIDIA’s new software library for computational lithography, cuLitho, is being integrated by TSMC, the world’s leading foundry, and electronic design automation leader Synopsys into their software, manufacturing processes, and systems for the latest-generation NVIDIA Hopper architecture GPUs. Equipment maker ASML is also working closely with NVIDIA on GPUs and cuLitho, planning to integrate support for GPUs into all of its computational lithography software products.
The advance will enable the creation of chips with smaller transistors and wires than currently achievable while accelerating time to market and boosting the energy efficiency of the massive data centers that drive the manufacturing process. Running on GPUs, cuLitho delivers a performance leap of up to 40x beyond current lithography, accelerating the massive computational workloads that currently consume tens of billions of CPU hours every year.
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. In the long term, cuLitho will enable better design rules, higher density, higher yields, and AI-powered lithography.
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