Design and performance evaluation of new massively parallel VLSI mask verification algorithms in JIGSAW

The massively parallel mask checking system JIGSAW is described. It has evolved from the authors' earlier feasibility study on large-scale, fine-grain parallelism in simple mask checking tasks (Proc. 24th DAC, 1988). Unlike previous systems, JIGSAW parallelizes all phases of the checking process. Described are new techniques to handle all-angle geometry, the first massively parallel mask flattening and multilayer netlist extraction algorithms, and measurements made comparing JIGSAW, running on a Connection Machine, against industry-standard tools. End-to-end speedups (i.e., from CIF to errors) range from 19 to 58 over DRACULA with larger masks producing larger speedups.<>