The IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) is the world’s preeminent forum for reporting technological breakthroughs in the areas of semiconductor and electronic device technology, design, manufacturing, physics, and modeling. It is the flagship conference forNanometer-scale CMOS transistor technology, advanced memory, displays, sensors, MEMS devices Novel quantum and nano-scale devices and phenomenology Optoelectronics, devices for power and energy harvesting, high-speed devices Process technology and device modeling and simulation

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.

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.