IMEC/NIT is taking its Unix applications to its customers on a portable Linux box.
by Erwin Glassee (NIT) and Rudi Cartuyvels (IMEC)
Our research group at the InterUniversity MicroElectronics Center (IMEC--more information about IMEC can be found on http://www.imec.be) in Leuven, Belgium is working on the simulation of microelectronic fabrication processes and microelectronic devices. Somewhat misleadingly, this is usually called Technology Computer Aided Design (TCAD). Simulation is gaining importance in the microelectronics industry as processes and devices are becoming more complex. Real prototype fabrication currently takes too much time and money in the development cycle for new technologies.
However, producing a good fabrication plan for a new semiconductor technology is difficult. Numerous parameters in the plan, such as furnace temperatures, process duration, implant doses of impurities and so on, influence the resulting semiconductor microstructure. Also, the electrical characteristics of the diodes, transistors and capacitors depend on the geometry and impurity of the contents of the microstructure. The engineer is responsible for coming up with a fabrication plan, such that all the electrical characteristics of the devices not only meet their specified values but also exhibit a minimal sensitivity towards the uncontrollable fluctuations on the numerous process parameters. Trial and error methods, combined with physical insight, were once the only tools available for engineers.
In order to help the engineer on this laborious and grave task, we developed a software package called NORMAN/DEBORA. Input to NORMAN/DEBORA is a template design for the fabrication plan, which contains a likely range for some of its parameters. The package then fires off simulations of some well-chosen fabrication plans and constructs mathematical models for the electrical characteristics.
The engineer can then interpret the template fabrication plan using these models. She will find the critical parameters and will see how the electrical characteristics are linked, whether the specified values are feasible and, of course, which parameter values could be used to achieve this. The engineer can judge the sensitivity of the electrical characteristics when parameter variations occur, as in real fabrication. This will determine the robustness of the fabrication plan. Finally, NORMAN/DEBORA can perform an optimization of the fabrication plan, taking into account specified electrical characteristics and parameter sensitivity.
Most engineering software currently runs on the more powerful Unix systems of various breeds, and so does NORMAN/DEBORA. When the product was leaving the research phase, demonstrations were held for potential customers. At first, we envisaged the microelectronics industry as the sole user. However, the general concept of iterative simulations, plan evaluation and optimization could also be applied to other fields of engineering, such as injection molding of plastics and mechanical analysis of dynamics, acoustics and vibrations.
Finding a place in the sun in the market for engineering software proved to be tougher than we expected. We visited customers, gave demonstrations and prepared successful examples on the customers' particular types of engineering projects, using their engineering software. For easy travelling, and to avoid installation procedures, we decided to install the software on a portable machine. Linux was the most attractive operating system, because it installs on a small, inexpensive portable PC. Since Linux itself is free, using it would be extremely cost-effective, with no compromises in the required functionality.
The time spent in configuring Linux on a portable and porting our software to it has certainly proven worthwhile. The machine has been used to give demonstrations at customers' sites with great ease, including two tours in the US and Canada. We are also working on engineering projects at customer sites and using the machine for a three day training course, held at the customer's site Our group members regularly take the machine home for the weekend when it's not being used by anyone else! Some of our customers are: Philips in the Netherlands, OKI in Japan, Kodak and Xerox in the US. Outside the field of microelectronic General Motors in the US is also using NORMAN/DEBORA.
The marketing and further commercial development of the package is handled by Numerical Integration Technologies (NIT), the leading company in the field of software for acoustic engineering.
As it hardly does any marketing itself, Linux usually enters a commercial organization through its supporters. A lot of them are software engineers, and they can have a hard time convincing their managers Linux is a viable and even superior solution. Therefore we want to thank the many programmers who have been developing the system and its application software. We intend to continue porting our software to the system at NIT.
Erwin Glassee has been a Unix software engineer for two years. He formerly worked at IMEC, and is now working at NIT.
Rudi Cartuyvels works at IMEC.