How TCAD Can Optimize Power Electronics

The power electronics (PE) market is growing rapidly, driven by the accelerating demand of EV and HEV vehicles. Power devices lend themselves to design and manufacturing innovations at the transistor-level to improve device performance and reduce development and production costs. Silicon-carbide (SiC), gallium-nitride (GaN), and other wide bandgap materials have started to replace silicon in high-voltage power devices.

TCAD

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

Talking Atoms to Systems in Next-Generation SoC Designs

New system-on-chip (SoC) devices are driving new memory architectures and photonic interfaces, while specialized new intellectual property (IP) requires analysis down to the nanometer and atomic levels because of single nanometer process nodes. According to Babak Taheri, CTO and EVP of products at Silvaco, a leading EDA Software, semiconductor IP company, a member of SEMI and the ESD Alliance, a SEMI Strategic Association Partner, design technology co-optimization and proven IP are required for this analysis.

Simulation and Analysis of Liquid Crystal on Silicon Pixels for Augmented Reality and Holography Applications

July 24, 2019 Since its invention in the early 1970s, liquid crystal on silicon (LCoS) technology has proven its success in a wide range of fields such as displays, adaptive optics, lithography and telecommunications. In this webinar, we will show the way of analyzing a phase-only LCoS-SLM using the simulation tool Clever LCD. Specifically, issues arising in driving the pixels and in shrinking the pixel size will be presented.

Silvaco TCAD: Introduction and the Basics – A Tutorial in 3 Parts

In this 3-part webinar series, viewers will be introduced to the suite of Silvaco TCAD software, and offered starter training and tutorial. The series will allow them to approach the complexity of suing TCAD from a good starting point and to learn quickly and confidently how to achieve successful TCAD simulation