There are times when I watch a presentation and wonder if I’ve travelled back in time. Though the keynote at Nvidia’s Spring GTC was, as at the prior events, relentlessly focused on AI and the reformulation of virtual reality as the metaverse, that is pretty much par for the course for Silicon Valley conglomerates right now.
The bit that felt like falling through a hole in time to 2010 was around Nvidia’s foray into software for chipmakers. The cuLitho library, similar to the those the company has released for AI, graphics and simulation, is meant to underpin software that tweaks shapes on the masks used to help form nanometre-scale features on the surface of a chip. According to Nvidia, using GPUs will speed up this process by orders of magnitude. However, things have been that way for some time.
At one point, lithography engineers thought progress might stop at around 1µm. They sailed through that perceived barrier back in the 1980s and have for about...