A surfel based three-dimensional visualization algorithm for photolithographic simulation

The visualization and interaction of the photolithography simulation result is useful and challenging for SOC design. Traditionally, to render large scene of wafer requires highly complex shapes with ever more triangles. Processing many small triangles leads to bandwidth bottlenecks and excessive floating point. To cope with this problem, we introduce surfel based algorithms. Surfel is point primitive without explicit connectivity. Besides, we proposes a data conversion algorithm to arrange the data output by simulator and convert light intensity data into depth data for 3D modeling. The experimental results demonstrate that our algorithms are effective for photolithography simulation with 3D interactive visualization in real-time. © 2008 IEEE.