On-Chip Variation and the Sign-off Timing Flow: An Industry Perspective
As semiconductor technology advances, the impact of on-chip variation increases, which means more sophisticated solutions are required.
Entries by Ingrid Schwarz
Maverick: Hierarchical Netlist Extractor for PC Platforms
Diamond is considered to be the ultimate semiconductor material for high power and high frequency devices due to its superior electrical and thermal properties, such as high breakdown field, high carrier mobility, low dielectric constant, and high thermal conductivity, as shown in Table 1.
MEDIA ALERT: Meet Silvaco at the TSMC OIP Ecosystem Forum
September 18, 2019
The Need for Advanced Wide Bandgap Power Electronics
PowerAmerica’s strategic roadmap for next generation wide bandgap (WBG) power electronics (PE) came out earlier this year. The public version of the roadmap includes a background/introduction and market forecast pertaining to silicon carbide (SiC) and gallium nitride (GaN) PE. I learned a great deal about SiC & GaN PE in this roadmap and I have copied the relevant sections below.
3D TCAD Simulation for Power Devices
y first IC design back in 1978 was a DRAM and it ran on 12V, 5V and -5V, but then my second DRAM was using only a 5V supply. Today we see SOCs running under a 1V supply voltage, but there is a totally different market for power devices that are at the other end of the voltage spectrum and they handle switching ranges from 12V – 250V. To learn more about power devices and how the process and device modeling is done, I read a Silvaco publication entitled Advanced Process and Device 3D TCAD Simulation of Split-Gate Trench UMOSFET.
Where Circuit Simulation Model Files Come From
I started out my engineering career by doing transistor-level circuit design and we used a proprietary SPICE circuit simulator. One thing that I quickly realized was that the accuracy of my circuit simulations depended entirely on the model files and parasitics. Here we are 40 years later and the accuracy of SPICE circuit simulations still depend on the model files and parasitics, but with the added task of using 3D field solvers to get accurate parasitic values, and even the use of 3D TCAD tools to model the complex physics of nm IC designs using FinFET transistors.
230 Papers on Power Device Simulations using Silvaco TCAD
A quick search of the IEEE Xplore online library gives a list of more than 230 published technical articles on Power Device Simulation using Silvaco TCAD. Here are some recent papers with the authors’ abstracts that cover silicon-carbide (SiC) and Junction-Less Double Gate MOSFET devices. Any mention of ‘we’ or ‘our’ refers to the paper’s authors:
Advanced Materials and New Architectures for AI Applications
Over the past 50 years in our industry, there have been three invariant principles:
Moore’s Law drives the pace of Si technology scaling
system memory utilizes MOS devices (for SRAM and DRAM)
computation relies upon the “von Neumann” architecture