Course development in IC manufacturing

• Published in: IEEE transactions on education Vol. 37; no. 4; pp. 341 - 350
• Main Author: Pineda de Gyvez, J.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.11.1994
• Subjects: Chemical technology; Circuit faults; Circuit synthesis; Design engineering; Isolation technology; Manufacturing processes; Microelectronics; Process design; Semiconductor device manufacture; Semiconductor process modeling
• ISSN: 0018-9359; 1557-9638
• DOI: 10.1109/13.330101

A traditional curriculum in electrical engineering separates semiconductor processing courses from courses in circuit design. As a result, manufacturing topics involving yield management and the study of random process variations impacting circuit behaviour are usually vaguely treated. The subject matter of this paper is to report a course developed at Texas A&M University, USA, to compensate for the aforementioned shortcoming. This course attempts to link technological process and circuit design domains by emphasizing aspects such as process disturbance modeling, yield modeling, and defect-induced fault modeling. In a rapidly changing environment where high-end technologies are evolving towards submicron features and towards high transistor integration, these aspects are key factors to design for manufacturability. The paper presents the course's syllabus, a description of its main topics, and results on selected project assignments carried out during a normal academic semester.< >