Perspectives on technology and technology-driven CAD

Computer-aided design (CAD) techniques are absolutely essential to harness the ever-increasing complexity of the microsystem design. Similarly, the technology CAD (TCAD) tools played a key role in the development of new technology generations. Although there is a common belief that the TCAD tools have been trailing the technology development, the situation has been changing very significantly especially over the last decade. For the deep submicrometer (DSM) devices, these tools provide a better insight than any measurement techniques and they have become indispensable in the new device creation. Moreover, these tools after calibration to a relatively small number of experiments, exhibit very impressive predictive power, which is utilized to speed up the technology integration and transfer to volume manufacturing. This results in very manufacturable high-yielding products that can be ramped up much faster than in the past decade, which is absolutely necessary given the huge costs of integrated circuit fabrication lines, short product lifecycles and penalties for being late to the market place. In this paper, we present our perspective on the semiconductor technology development, and highlight the rapid growth of TCAD and its strategic use in the semiconductor industry.