At the start of GTC 2023 earlier this week, NVIDIA had more than a few announcement made during the keynote. Among those announcements, the GPU brand announced a new CuLitho software library, made in part with the semiconductor manufacturing business in mind.
“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 plans to integrate support for GPUs into all of their computational lithography software products,” as per the official press release of by NVIDIA.
“The chip industry is the foundation of nearly every other industry in the world,” Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, said during the keynote. “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.”
The average size of semiconductor chips found in devices these days currently sit between 4nm and 5nm, and as it stands, companies like TSMC are already setting up facilities to accommodate 2nm processes and thinner. In case you’re wondering just how small 2nm is, the thickness of a strand of human DNA is 2.5nm.
With CuLitho, NVIDIA says its new software library will increase the performance of such lithography by 40 times more than the current lithography. By its estimation, fabs using the technology could produce three to five times more photomasks with nine times less power than what current plants and fabs consume.
You can check out NVIDIA’s GTC 2023 keynote via the YouTube video we’ve embedded in the article, should you wish to learn more about the other technologies the company announced beyond CuLitho.
