FPGA-Based Hardware Acceleration of Lithographic Aerial Image Simulation

Lithography simulation, an essential step in design for manufacturability (DFM), is still far from computationally efficient. Most leading companies use large clusters of server computers to achieve acceptable turn-around time. Thus coprocessor acceleration is very attractive for obtaining increased computational performance with a reduced power consumption. This article describes the implementation of a customized accelerator on FPGA using a polygon-based simulation model. An application-specific memory partitioning scheme is designed to meet the bandwidth requirements for a large number of processing elements. Deep loop pipelining and ping-pong buffer based function block pipelining are also implemented in our design. Initial results show a 15X speedup versus the software implementation running on a microprocessor, and more speedup is expected via further performance tuning. The implementation also leverages state-of-art C-to-RTL synthesis tools. At the same time, we also identify the need for manual architecture-level exploration for parallel implementations. Moreover, we implement the algorithm on NVIDIA GPUs using the CUDA programming environment, and provide some useful comparisons for different kinds of accelerators.