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