Synopsys, the provider of semiconductor design software, and Shanghai Hua Hong NEC Electronics (HHNEC), today announced HHNEC's adoption of Synopsys' Proteus optical proximity correction (OPC) software.

HHNEC is a joint venture between NEC Corporation, Jazz Semiconductor and Shanghai Hua Hong Group. HHNEC selected Proteus to increase accuracy, decrease mask synthesis turn-around-time and obtain higher yields through the utilization of Proteus' scalable architecture.

As process node size decreases, the processing time for OPC increases. Proteus' distributed processing architecture allows customers to reduce turn-around-time by using clusters of inexpensive Linux-based CPUs.