Display Technology Solution
Silvaco’s product suite is used for design of both thin-film transistor (TFT) LCD displays and organic LED (OLED) displays. With the growth in adoption of smartphones, flat-screen TVs, smart watches and more this is an area of increasing importance. Almost all manufacturers of displays use the Silvaco suite for design and most of these designs are in high-volume manufacturing.
For TFT design there is full support for amorphous silicon (a-Si), p-Si, a-IGZO and organic TFT processes. There is also full support for active matrix OLED and LCD design.
Silvaco has a complete flow from TCAD-to-Signoff for display design. The device characteristics that TCAD produces can be used for a first level of analysis and then special SPICE compact models such as RPI for a-Si TFT or UOTFT for organic and oxide TFTs can be created for SPICE simulation.
A typical flow would include the Victory Process and Victory Device simulator to model the intrinsic electrical characteristics of novel transistors, such as TFTs. The Clever extractor determines a pixel’s parasitic RC values to ensure that the display has the sensitivity required to meet performance specification. For electrical analysis of devices, such as TFTs, transistor modeling is done with Utmost IV. The SmartSpice simulator utilizes Utmost models to show waveform behavior of the array circuitry found in displays.
Because displays are large, sometimes very large, the simulation capacity is very important. SmartSpice Pro runs with parallel cores and huge capacity to handle the largest displays. Display hysteresis can also be simulated. Design capture and layout are done with the Gateway schematic editor and the Expert high-capacity layout editor, which together improve designer productivity and reduce errors. Silvaco provides the complete solution necessary for successful display design.
Simulation of TFT Circuitry in an OLED Display