  An extremely fast time-harmonic finite element solver developed for the
transmission analysis of photonic crystals was applied to mask simulation
problems. The applicability was proven by examining a set of typical problems
and by a benchmarking against two established methods (FDTD and a differential
method) and an analytical example. The new finite element approach was up to
100 times faster than the competing approaches for moderate target accuracies,
and it was the only method which allowed to reach high target accuracies.
