Over the last decades, integrated circuits have changed our everyday lives in a number of ways. Many common devices today taken for granted would not have been possible without this industrial revolution. Central to the manufacturing of integrated circuits is the photomask used to expose the wafers. Additionally, such photomasks are also used for manufacturing of flat screen displays. Microlithography, the manufacturing technique of such photomasks, requires complex electronics equipment that excels in both speed and fidelity. Manufacture of such equipment requires competence in virtually all engineering disciplines, where the conversion of geometry into pixels is but one of these. Nevertheless, this single step in the photomask drawing process has a major impact on the throughput and quality of a photomask writer. Current high-end semiconductor writers from Micronic use a cluster of Field-Programmable Gate Array circuits (FPGA). FPGAs have for many years been able to replace Application Specific Integrated Circuits due to their flexibility and low initial development cost. For parallel computation, an FPGA can achieve throughput not possible with microprocessors alone. Nevertheless, high-performance FPGAs are expensive devices, and upgrading from one generation to the next often requires a major redesign. During the last decade, the computer games industry has taken the lead in parallel computation with graphics card for 3D gaming. While essentially being designed to render 3D polygons and lacking the flexibility of an FPGA, graphics cards have nevertheless started to rival FPGAs as the main workhorse of many parallel computing applications. This thesis covers an investigation on utilizing graphics cards for the task of rendering geometry into photomask patterns. It describes different strategies that were tried and the throughput and fidelity achieved with them, along with the problems encountered. It also describes the development of a suitable evaluation framework that was critical to the process.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:liu-11800 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Creators | Iwaniec, Michel |
| Publisher | Linköpings universitet, Institutionen för teknik och naturvetenskap, Institutionen för teknik och naturvetenskap |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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