Jan 10, 2007

An interesting grant offer

The Microelectronics National Center (in Barcelona, dependent on the Spanish Research Council (CSIC)) opened a call for proposals to allow external researchers the use of their installations. The grant offer may also include allocation fees. Interesting to all those interested, mainly, in MEMs.

Jan 9, 2007

Tanner

Nearly a year after they released the 11.2 version of Tanner Tools, they are releasing a new version 12.2. Why am I posting this? Because they were one of the first to implement the PSP model (I remind you that PSP was elected on november 2005 by the CMC as the new standard). However, I'd like to point out that no effort has been put into implementing the other finalist (HiSim) or even the BSIM5. Life is hard for loser models...

Jan 5, 2007

Plastic electronics

I've got a mail from a friend (Jamal Deen) with some very important news to all those working on plastic electronics: it seems that Plastic Logic has got some small cash (around 100.000.000'00 USD) to start a production facility in Dresden, Germany. They are planning to build the first commercial production plant of plastic electronics, starting in 2008 (yes, that is next year!). Look at their press release here.

The other news is that Polymer Vision (Philips' spin-off) will be starting the production of rollable displays as soon as this same year. See the press release here.

Well, big news for everybody. It seems that we're about to enter a new age in consumer electronics, that of flexible electronics. Changes are very likely to be huge, but this is good, don't you agree?

Jan 4, 2007

Simulators

Today, I'll talk about ngSpice. The link is a page dedicated to this free-source simulator (in fact, it is its homepage). there you can find anything you need to download and compile one of the best simulators going around. However, the point is not only that it is a very good simulator, but that you can also implement your models there. And it's for free.... If you need more, you can also go to the gEDA project, that is a full design suite. It is more oriented to simulation of circuits than to simulation of devices, but it can be useful to device people to check the model in a full design flow.

Jan 3, 2007

Conferences

A friend of mine (Benjamin Iñiguez) has sent me links to some important conferences regarding compact modeling. The first one is to be held on Yokohama, Japan on January 23, and it is called the 4th International Workshop on Compact Modeling (IWCM). Lots of interesting talks and many good research being presented there.

The second link is for the 2007 Workshop on Compact Modeling, to be held in Santa Clara on May, 20-24. Also lots of important people (Jamal Deen, Chenming Hu, Matthias Bucher, Tor Fjieldy, Benjamin Iñiguez, Adelmo Ortiz-Conde, etc..), so it is very possible that you will find lots of important results there.

Another conference is the CDE, in Spain. It is a national one, but many good people is going there.

Jan 2, 2007

Why models are useful

Have a look at this blog from David Rutledge. It explanins very clearly what models (as he says, in the sense used in the Semiconductor industry) are, and what are they used for. He explains many things about different kinds of models, including the whole design process. It is good to keep an eye on the whole process, and not to get too focused on the mathematical modeling of the transistors.

Happy new year!

Well, after the celebrations of New Year, it's now time to get again to the real life. There are lots of things to comment on.
The first thing is the effect of the earthquake on the semiconductor production capabilities of Taiwan and the neighbour countries. People says that these effectes have been "limited" (have a look at this link: it is a very good source of news). We'll see...
I'd like to comment also the work of one of my students: she passed her final project on december 22 (with very good marks...), and she is now a very happy telecom engineer. However, her project had little to do with telecommunications, because I was directing her and it is traditional in our university that the project is related to the research of the supervisor. The project was on comparing the goodness of different methods of fitting models to experimental results using genetic algorithms. She compared queen-bee with classical methods, plus a combination of both. Results were quite good. If you are interested, ask me...