[paper] DEVSIM

Sanchez, J. E.,

DEVSIM: A TCAD Semiconductor Device Simulator

Journal of Open Source Software, 7(70), 3898, (2022).

DOI:10.21105/joss.03898

Abstract: DEVSIM is technology computer-aided design (TCAD) software for semiconductor device simulation. By solving the equations for electric fields and current flow, it simulates the electrical behavior of semiconductor devices, such as transistors. It can be used to model existing, fabricated devices for calibration purposes. It is also possible to explore novel device structures and exotic materials, reducing the number of costly and time-consuming manufacturing iterations While DEVSIM has limited capabilities for the creation of 1-D and 2-D meshes, the Pythoninterface allows the import of mesh structures from any format using a triangular representation (in 2-D) or a tetrahedral representation (in 3-D). This makes it possible for the user to utilize high quality open source meshing solutions.

FIG: 90-nm 3-D MOSFET. The polysilicon gate (2) is surrounded by oxide (5) and two nitride regions (3) and (4). The bulk region (1) has a 120nm drawn gate length. The source and drain contacts are both 50 nm underneath the nitride regions. A body contact was placed on the bottom of the 60nm silicon region. The oxide thickness is 4.9 nm and the device is 25nm thick.

Call for Book Chapters

Nanoscale Electronic Device Applications of Carbon Nanotubes,

Graphene, Silicene and Molybdenum Disulfide

[book] Device Circuit Co-Design Issues in FETs

Device Circuit Co-Design Issues in FETs

Editors: Shubham Tayal, Billel Smaani, Shiromani Balmukund Rahi, Samir Labiod, Zeinab Ramezani

ISBN 9781032414256280 Pages 269 B/W Illustrations 

August 22, 2023 by CRC Press

Description

This book provides an overview of emerging semiconductor devices and their applications in electronic circuits, which form the foundation of electronic devices. Device Circuit Co-Design Issues in FETs provides readers with a better understanding of the ever-growing field of low-power electronic devices and their applications in the wireless, biosensing, and circuit domains. The book brings researchers and engineers from various disciplines of the VLSI domain together to tackle the emerging challenges in the field of engineering and applications of advanced low-power devices in an effort to improve the performance of these technologies. The chapters examine the challenges and scope of FinFET device circuits, 3D FETs, and advanced FET for circuit applications. The book also discusses low-power memory design, neuromorphic computing, and issues related to thermal reliability. The authors provide a good understanding of device physics and circuits, and discuss transistors based on the new channel/dielectric materials and device architectures to achieve low-power dissipation and ultra-high switching speeds to fulfill the requirements of the semiconductor industry. This book is intended for students, researchers, and professionals in the field of semiconductor devices and nanodevices, as well as those working on device-circuit co-design issues.

Table of Contents

1. Modeling for CMOS Circuit Design. 

2. Conventional CMOS Circuit Design. 

3. Compact modeling of junctionless Gate-All-Around MOSFET for circuit simulation. 

4. Novel Gate-Overlap Tunnel FETs for Superior Analog, Digital, and Ternary Logic Circuit Applications. 

5. Phase Transition Materials for Low Power Electronics. 

6. Impact of total ionizing dose effect on SOI-FinFET with spacer engineering. 

7. Scope and Challenges with Nanosheet FET based Circuit design. 

8. Scope with TFET based Circuit and System Design. 

9. An overview of FinFET based Capacitorless 1T-DRAM. 

10. Literature Review of the SRAM Circuits Design Challenges. 

11.Challenges and Future Scope of Gate-All-Around (GAA) Transistors: 

Physical Insights of Device-Circuit Interactions. 

[paper] DMT-core: A Python Toolkit for Semiconductor Device Engineers

Mario Krattenmacher^1,2, Markus Müller^1,2, Pascal Kuthe^1,2, and Michael Schröter^1,2

DMT-core: A Python Toolkit for Semiconductor Device Engineers

Journal of Open Source Software, 7(75), 4298

DOI: 10.21105/joss.04298

1 CEDIC, TU Dresden, Dresden (D)

2 SemiMod GmbH, Dresden (D)

Abstract: Semiconductor device engineers are faced by a number of non-trivial tasks that can be solved efficiently using software. These tasks include, amongst others, data analysis, visualization and processing, as well as interfacing various circuit and Technology-Computer-Aided-Design (TCAD) simulators. In practice, custom ‘home-made’ scripts of varying quality are employed to solve these tasks. It is often found that fundamental software engineering concepts, such as Test-Driven-Development (Shull et al., 2010), or the use of state-of-the-art version control tools (e.g. Git) and practices (e.g. continuous integration, CI), are not utilized by these scripts. The issues inflicted by this practice include:

• The analysis/visualization/generation of data becomes difficult to reproduce.
• Device engineers work far from their maximum work-efficiency, as they are hindered, instead of empowered, by the software infrastructure.
• Knowledge built-up, possibly over decades, may be lost when developers leave a company or institution.

The Device Modeling Toolkit (DMT) presented here aims to solve these issues. DMT provides a Python library that offers:

• classes and methods relevant to commonly used device engineering tasks
• several abstract base classes for implementing new interfaces to various types of simulators
• concrete implementations of the abstract base classes for open-source simulators such as Ngspice (Vogt, 2022), Xyce (Keiter et al., 2014) or Hdev (Müller et al., 2022).

DMT-based simulations allow data generation, workflow implementation and visualization to be implemented in a single file, enabling more efficient cooperation and more reproducible research (Stodden et al., 2016). Basic principles in software engineering, such as unit testing,v ersion control, and documentation, are adhered to so that others can use and contribute to the software.

FIG: DMT interfacing a circuit simulator and corresponding data flow.

Related Publications: DMT is used internally by CEDIC staff in research and by SemiMod for commercial purposes. It has also been used by cooperating institutions and companies. The project has been used inthe following contexts:

• for circuit simulations (Weimer et al., 2022),
• for TCAD simulations and plotting (Markus Muller et al., 2021),
• for circuit and TCAD simulations (M. Muller et al., 2022),
• for model parameter extraction (Müller & Schröter, 2019) and
• for model parameter extraction and TCAD simulation (Phillips et al., 2022).

In addition, DMT has been cited in (Grabinski, 2019; Kuthe et al., 2020; Müller et al., 2019,

2021).

Related Projects: DMT directly uses the VerilogAE (Kuthe et al., 2020) for accessing all information in Verilog-AMS files. The TCAD simulator Hdev (Müller et al., 2022) uses the class DutHdev as its Python interface.

Acknowledgements: This project would not have been possible without our colleagues Dipl.-Ing. Christoph Weimer and Dr.-Ing. Yves Zimmermann. We particularly acknowledge Wladek Grabinski for his efforts to promote the use of open source software in the semiconductor community.

REF:

Shull, F., Melnik, G., Turhan, B., Layman, L., Diep, M., & Erdogmus, H. (2010). What do we know about test-driven development? IEEE Softw., 27(6), 16–19. https://doi.org/10.1109/MS.2010.152
Vogt, H. (2022). Ngspice, the open source Spice circuit simulator - Intro. http://ngspice. sourceforge.net/
Keiter, E. R., Mei, T., Russo, T. V., Schiek, R. L., Sholander, P. E., Thornquist, H. K., Verley, J. C., & Baur, D. G. (2014). Xyce Parallel Electronic Simulator Reference Guide , Version 6 . 2 (September). Sandia National Laboratories (SNL). https://doi.org/10.2172/1826862
Müller, M., Mothes, S., Claus, M., & Schröter, M. (2022). Hdev: A 1D and 2D Hydrodynamic/Drift-Diffusion solver for SiGe and III-V HBTs. J. Open Source Software
Stodden, V., McNutt, M., Bailey, D. H., Deelman, E., Gil, Y., Hanson, B., Heroux, M. A., Ioannidis, J. P. A., & Taufer, M. (2016). Enhancing reproducibility for computational methods. Science, 354(6317), 1240–1241. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aah6168 
Grabinski, W. (2019). FOSS TCAD/EDA tools for compact modeling. Arbeitskreis Bipolar.
https://www.iee.et.tu-dresden.de/iee/eb/forsch/AK-Bipo/2019/7-MOS-AK-Association_wgr_BipAK19.pdf

ESSDERC ESSCIRC in Graz (A)

 ESSDERC 2015: 45th European Solid-State Device Conference

 ESSCIRC 2015: 41th European Solid-State Circuits Conference

 September 14-18, 2015 - Graz, Austria

The aim of ESSDERC and ESSCIRC is to provide an annual European forum for the presentation and discussion of recent advances in solid-state devices and circuits. The increasing level of integration for system-on-chip design made available by advances in silicon technology is, more than ever before, calling for a deeper interaction among technologists, device experts, IC designers, and system designers. While keeping separate Technical Program Committees, ESSCIRC and ESSDERC are governed by a common Steering Committee and share Plenary Keynote Presentations and Joint Sessions bridging both communities. Attendees registered for either conference are encouraged to attend any of the scheduled parallel sessions, regardless to which conference they belong.

Read more:

• Program at a glance (Sept. 14 to 18, 2015 including Tutorials and Workshops)
• Program folder