Silvaco TCAD Webinar

TCAD is a somewhat specialized area since not that many people design semiconductor processes compared to the number who design chips. Bit without TCAD there would be no chips. One area where the two domains intersect is that of SEE, where neutrons (mainly) can cause a flop or a memory bit to change. Since we live on a radioactive planet that is not going away and the smaller a transistor the less it needs to flip it.

Silvaco have a webinar coming up on the topic titled Simulating Total Dose, Prompt Dose, Damaging Fluence and SEU Using TCAD. It is Tuesday February 17th from 10-11am Pacific time. Her is what it will cover:

• Introduction to a newly available and recently declassified Total Dose model
• Description of the physical mechanisms accounted for in the Total Dose Model, including radiation induced de-trapping of trapped oxide holes.
• How certain bias conditions during radiation can reduce the trapped hole concentration in radiation hardened oxides, leading to radiation induced threshold voltage recovery (this is NOT the normal “rebound” effect caused by the slow formation of interface traps).
• How to simulate a particle fluence that creates damage in the semiconductor
• How to simulate transient, very high dose rate “prompt” events.
• Simulating other, more traditional high energy Single Particle Events (SEE)
• Examples include, threshold voltage shift and inter device leakage from Total Dose oxide charging, Image Sensor Damage from a fluence of protons, Prompt Dose effects on a circuit, Single Event Burnout (SEB) of a power PiN diode, Single Event Upset (SEU) of a 22nm SRAM

The presenter is Derek Kimpton, Principal Applications Engineer at Silvaco, who spent four years characterizing radiation effects on devices at Plessey Semiconductors in Lincoln, England. Whilst there he published the paper in Solid-State Electronics on a new and predictive total dose oxide charging model, that is the basis for the code implemented in Silvaco’s latest TCAD Victory Device simulator.

Who should attend? Well, all in the radiation effects community, with an interest in the simulation of radiation effects on electronic devices using physics based (TCAD) tools. But given that all chips are affected by radiation then everyone is at least peripherally affected by this. So although this is an area of increasing importance even to people who think it doesn’t affect them.

For more details and to registration are here.

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