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SPIE: BlueGene enters the DFM fray |
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Feb 27, 2007 at 09:10 AM |
In one of the more interesting plenary presentations here at the SPIE Advanced Lithography conference, George Gomba, Director of Lithography Technology at IBM, focused his talk on the teamwork aspect of litho requirements using immersion lithography down to the 32nm node.
The ‘team' in question is in-house developed software for IC design and DFM software with the hardware of IBM's BlueGene supercomputer.
According to Gomba, highly accurate simulations have been achieved using a single path immersion litho process through to the 32nm node that of course relies increasingly on aggressive OPC/RET techniques as well as design rules and DFM to achieve yielding features.
The work would have taken 8 months of waiting for a conventional dedicated workstation to pump out the results, yet Gomba's team used IBM's BlueGene powerhouse to do the same work in 12 hours flat. Furthermore, the accuracy was greater than anything else, which is probably why IBM is now confident that immersion can be used down to 22nm using double patterning.
Brion just launched its latest Tachyon station this week and uses FPGAs to do the number crunching. With IBM touting the need for BlueGene power, Brion may need to upgrade to 3.0 faster than many had thought!
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