Aug 23, 2007

Agilent Announces New HVMOS Package For IC-CAP Software

I copy part of the press release (please note the language they use):

Agilent Technologies Inc. announced the availability of a new parameter extraction solution for high voltage (HV) complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) devices used in a range of automotive and consumer products, as well as LCD and display driver applications. The HVMOS extraction package, for use with Agilent's Integrated Circuit Characterization and Analysis Program (IC-CAP) software platform, enables engineers to model HV CMOS devices using Synopsys' HSPICE simulator, HVMOS Level 66 compact model.

Implemented as a compact model in HSPICE, HVMOS Level 66 compact model outperforms most other HVMOS model solutions in speed and convergence. The HVMOS model includes all relevant physical effects unique to high-voltage operation, including symmetric and asymmetric source and drain resistances, quasi-saturation, transconductance fall off at high-gate voltage, and self-heating effects. As a result, it allows HV CMOS devices to be modeled with unparalleled DC and capacitance modeling accuracy and simulation speed. HVMOS models are used by both analog and digital designers during circuit simulation.

Source: Semiconductor Online

Aug 22, 2007

Statistical simulation of memories

In the last issue of electronics letters (August 2 2007, vol 43, issue 16), there is an interesting paper on statistical simulation of sub-100nm memories. Here you have the link to the abstract, and try to have a look at it. I think that this (I mean: incorporating statistical techniques into the whole model) is an issue for a good compact model to be accepted by the design community.
Otherwise, if there is no way to take into account the huge variations in modern technologies, the model will be quite useless for them.

Aug 20, 2007

Scaling effects on short-channel organic transistors

If you are interested in organic transistors, perhaps you will appreciate having a look at the paper "Scaling effect on the operation stability of short-channel organic single-crystal transistors", appeared in the Applied Physics Letters of 6 August 2007 (link).
As they say in the abstract: "Organic single-crystal transistors allowed the authors to investigate the essential features of short-channel devices. Rubrene single-crystal transistors with channel lengths of 500 and 100 nm exhibited good field-effect characteristics under extremely low operation voltages, although space charge limited current degrades the subthreshold properties of 100 nm devices. Furthermore, bias-stress measurements revealed the remarkable stability of organic single-crystal transistors regardless of device size. The bias-stress effect was explained by the trapping of gate-induced charges into localized density of states in the single-crystal channel."