Calibrating a Typical Bipolar Process Flow

Introduction

A common request from TCAD (Technology Computer Aided Design) users is advise on how to calibrate the process flow and device simulator to a particular technology. In this article, guidelines are presented for calibration of process and device simulations for a typical poly-emitter bipolar process. Such a process would be used to create a structure shown in Figure 1. Unlike a MOSFET process where calibration mostly takes place in the process simulation, calibration of a bipolar process will include parameters in both the process and device simulators. A simple procedure is presented here that highlights the most important parameters that require calibration and indicates the expected region of the gummel plot over which each variable has the most influence.