Originally posted by: TuxDave
But then again, remember I'm cheating with compression. :-D
Semiconductor Research Corporation
It has been shown that approximately 10 Tb/s of information needs to be transferred to the writers of a maskless lithography system by the 50 nm generation to be able to write a 300 mm wafer layer per minute, which is in line with current mask-based systems. This calls for a highly parallel datapath architecture. Assuming that the writers will be implemented on the same chip, data compression would be implemented to allow for lower input rates. Issues that need to be analyzed are power consumption, compression ratio, and chip area required to attain a certain throughput.
We have recently designed a scaled down version of a datapath for a maskless lithography chip. The chip incorporates LZ-77 data compression, as well as an SRAM writer interface circuitry. It implements eight parallel decompression paths, Huffman, LZ, runlength, memory, as well as framing and error detection.