There are many inventions described and illustrated herein. In one aspect, the present invention is directed to a technique of, and
system for simulating, verifying, inspecting, characterizing, determining and / or evaluating the lithographic designs, techniques and / or systems, and / or individual functions performed thereby or components used therein. In one embodiment, the present invention is a
system and method that accelerates
lithography simulation, inspection, characterization and / or evaluation of the optical characteristics and / or properties, as well as the effects and / or interactions of lithographic systems and
processing techniques. In this regard, in one embodiment, the present invention employs a
lithography simulation system architecture, including application-specific hardware accelerators, and a
processing technique to accelerate and facilitate
verification, characterization and / or inspection of a
mask design, for example, RET design, including detailed
simulation and characterization of the entire
lithography process to verify that the design achieves and / or provides the desired results on final
wafer pattern. The system includes: (1)
general purpose-type computing device(s) to perform the case-based logic having branches and inter-dependency in the data handling and (2) accelerator subsystems to perform a majority of the computation intensive tasks.