ALEXANDRIA, Va., Sept. 17 -- United States Patent no. 12,417,334, issued on Sept. 16, was assigned to NVIDIA Corp. (Santa Clara, Calif.).
"Lithography simulation using a neural network" was invented by Haoyu Yang (Cedar Park, Texas), Haoxing Ren (Austin, Texas) and Zongyi Li (Alhambra, Calif.).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "As integrated circuit geometries have shrunk, lithography simulation has developed to ensure that the masks used to fabricate the circuits satisfy the chip yield and fabrication turnaround time targets. To manufacture an integrated circuit (chip), an initial layout for the integrated circuit design is processed to compute a wafer image (e.g., resist material "printed" on th...