Using Victory Process to Create Realistic Structures for Capacitance Extraction in Clever

1. Introduction

Silvaco offers many alternatives for creating simple 3D structures, the optimum choice depending on what the user needs to simulate.  Many of the choices for creating simple 3D structures are for user convenience, so that just a single tool can both create the simple 3D structure and simulate the required physics. This gives the user an enhanced feeling of a tightly integrated product.

However, when realistic and curved 3D shapes are necessary, the complexity of the code required for their creation and subsequent meshing, necessitates that for efficiency sake, there is only one structure building interface. The idea being that there is only one complex 3D structure creator for realistic process simulation, and that this complex structure is then imported into the appropriate tool for device or back end simulations. To this end, when realistic process simulation is required to create a complex 3D structure, Victory Process will be used as the universal interface tool.

In this article, we demonstrate how to interface realistic 3D structures created using Victory Process, with the back end parasitic extraction tool, called Clever.  Clever uses a field solver operating on 3D structures to calculate both the parasitic resistance and capacitance of the interconnect lines within the structure.  If the 3D structure is “Manhattan” in nature (all features within the 3D structure are “square sided”), then Clever’s internal 3D builder is sufficient.  However, when realistic processing features are required, then the enhanced capability of Victory Process becomes necessary.