Electrical testing and simulation in the Microelectronic Engineering Department at RIT

The education of a microelectronic process engineer involves a number of disciplines that must be woven together in the curriculum. The overall goal that a process engineer strives for is improvement of the product. Certain classes may focus on analyzing and improving individual processes such as plasma etching. The data collected for an individual process may not be easy to link to final product performance parameters. The final product's improvement is typically monitored by measurement of device or circuit electrical parameters. Electrical testing done in manufacturing classes then plays a key role in the education of a microelectronic engineer. The goal is to have the collected data tie together processing device physics, electronics and statistics course work. This paper describes the broad approach RIT has used to meet this goal.