Towards Using Julia for Real-Time applications in ASML

ASML is a 30.000+ employee company which is the world leader on photo-lithographic systems that are crucial for semiconductor manufacturing. During the last two years a community of Julia enthusiasts has been running pilot projects to assess opportunities offered by Julia for rapid development of early Proof-of-Concepts and, subsequent, rapid deployment in prototypes and, whether possible, actual products. Similar to other robotic systems, ASML lithography systems have hard real-time....

... requirements, which means that software execution must be highly performant & deterministic (i.e., predictable and reproducible). As such, design engineers must look at various aspects when developing software, like fine control of memory, optimal design of data types and modeling algorithms, as well as efficient CPU cache utilization.

User controlled garbage collection (or memory management) and system image binary contents(e.g., absence of JiT, removal of metadata etc.) revealed to be essential aspects to consider making Julia accepted as a language of choice in such a complex domain, compared to more (low level) established languages like C and C++. The goal of this talk is to discuss the strategies and techniques that we explored to enable us using Julia in the on-line execution of lithography models.

We believe that this work will provide new insights about Julia future, by giving new opportunities for further adoption of Julia in complex industrial software systems