The RTCR v3 (Real Time Correction Rasterizer) program was developed to meet two important image writer requirements:
What drives these requirements?
Modern image writers for printed circuit boards, IC packages and displays have areas starting at 600 mm x 600 mm and ranging up to 1500 mm x 2500 mm. At the same time, the DPI for these machines has risen from 4000 DPI to as high as 50,000 DPI. The total number of pixels can exceed a trillion.
Consider also that the fine lines (5-10 um) coupled with the size of the substrate result the need to account for tiny dimensional changes in the substrate -- if such changes are not accounted for the data printed onto the substrate will not align with pre-existing vias or structures already present.
The substrate distortion variations from panel to panel are sufficient that one must measure known targets on each substrate after it is loaded into the image writer. Only then can the RIP compute the distortions required to align the bitmap onto that substrate.
While the RIP is building a new bitmap the machine is idle. Throughput is no longer limited solely by the image writer's ability to "spray" the pixels but becomes a combination of RIP speed and image writer speed.
This is why we called our new software RIP the "real time correction rasterizer".
The RTCR achieves its speed by taking the advantage of the fact that most micro-electronic masks contain large amounts of repetition. If that can be extracted then bit copy operations can be used which are much faster than brute force raster computations. READ MORE ...
The image produced by RTCR can be as large as several hundred GBytes (uncompressed). How does the program manage available RAM (which is typically in the 32 to 64 GB range) to produce that file? Striping ... READ MORE ...