According to several media reports, on October 8, US Eastern Time, Nvidia, a major AI chip manufacturer, emphasized the achievements of cooperation with TSMC in the field of accelerated computing: its computing lithography platform named cuLitho is being put into production by TSMC.
Nvidia said that cuLitho will accelerate computing into the field of computational lithography, and that putting cuLitho into production will enable TSMC to accelerate the development of next-generation chip technology, while the current production process is approaching the limits of physics.TSMC's use of cuLitho for production can increase the speed of manufacturing the next generation of advanced semiconductor chips and break through physical limitations.
In March 2023, Nvidia announced the introduction of accelerated computing into computational lithography, enabling semiconductor companies such as ASML, TSMC and Synopsys to accelerate the design and manufacture of next-generation chips.
NVIDIA cuLitho is a library of optimized tools and algorithms for GPU-accelerated computational lithography and semiconductor manufacturing processes that are orders of magnitude faster than current CPU-based methods.
According to officials, cuLitho offers a 40-fold performance improvement over current lithography (the process of creating patterns on silicon) when running on GPUs, accelerating massive computing workloads that currently consume tens of billions of CPU hours per 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 to reduce power requirements and potential environmental impact.
In the short term, a fab using cuLitho can produce 3-5 times as many photomasks (templates for chip design) per day and consume 9 times less power than the current configuration.A photomask that used to take two weeks can now be processed overnight.In the long run, cuLitho will enable better design rules, higher density, higher yield, and AI lithography.
"The chip industry is the foundation of almost all other industries in the world," said Huang Renxun, CEO of Nvidia at the time.Lithography at its physical limits, NVIDIA launches cuLitho and partners TSMC, ASML, and Synopsys to enable fabs to increase yield, reduce carbon footprint, and lay the foundation for 2 nm and beyond.