| This rapid pace of technology development in the semiconductor sector has been greatly aided by advances in modeling and simulation tools. With optical lithography fast approaching physical limits as the feature sizes shrink to the sub-100 nm region, the industry is now faced with deploying new technologies to stay competitive. The exorbitant cost of emerging technologies such EUV, EBL, PXL, IPL, etc., have in turn created a dire need for modeling and simulation tools that can not only develop, characterize, and evaluate current technologies, but allow the technologists to compare future technologies as well. As these technologies get more and more complex, it becomes apparent that just having a set of physical models is not nearly sufficient—the modeling environments need to be architected using modern software engineering in software.; This thesis describes the design and evolution of Virtual Lithography Laboratory (VLL), a software framework created to act as a delivery vehicle for multiple complex technologies, and discusses original contributions in several fields: (1) new software engineering methodologies for designing complex system models, (2) rigorous physics-based models of complex systems, (3) extensive set of multi-threaded and parallel numerical algorithms, designed to take advantage of multi-processor engineering workstations and distributed clusters, and (4) dynamic and interactive visualization tools for very large datasets, from wavefront propagation in the optical system to energy deposition in macro-molecules. |
