Partner und Internationale Organisationen
(Englisch)
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Institut für Integrierte Systeme, ETH Zürich (CH), Robert Bosch, Reutlingen (D), IMEC, Leuven (B), SGS Thomson, Cornaredo (I), Universität Bologna (I)
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Abstract
(Englisch)
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Objectives: The business objectives of the project are to reduce design cycle time, increase productivity, and improve product reliability. The overall technical objective is to develop a design methodology that employs device and circuit simulators to assure and to optimize integrated circuit ESD protection. The design methodology for production will change from the current largely-empirical approach based on extensive destructive testing to Technological Computer-Aided Design (TCAD) guided critical parameter evaluation, validated by a relatively small number of analytical high-current measurements. More specifically the objectives are
1. to gain insight in ESD problems and to investigate possible design options for a well established smart power technology, and design and processing options for advanced VLSI processes in order to obtain a high ESD performance,
2. to investigate and optimize the behavior of protection devices under different ESD stress models, including Transmission Line Pulses, Human Body Model and Charged Device Model,
3. to provide basic physical models that are still lacking modeling, and that are relevant for ESD
4. and to make the enhanced TCAD code commercially available.
Approach: The participating partners comprise a well-known system company, R. Bosch GmbH, acting as the project coordinator, a large semiconductor company, SGS-Thomson Microelectronics (ST), a TCAD software house founded in 1993 to exploit the results of the ESPRIT-6075 (DESSIS) project, ISE AG, two University institutions, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ) and the University of Bologna (UBO), and an independent research center, IMEC. Moreover, the Fraunhofer Institute for Solid State Technology (IFT Munich) acts as a subcontractor of Bosch.
The University of Bologna develops improved physical models which are relevant for ESD modeling. Bosch, together with its semiconductor supplier ST and subcontractor IFT, concentrate on investigating the system design aspects of their smart power technology for automotive applications. IMEC tackles the new problems that are arising when scaling towards advanced VLSI technologies, such as 0.5 mm and 0.25 mm CMOS. ISE AG and ETHZ concentrate on the development and exploitation of enhanced TCAD tools comprising both device and circuit modeling that incorporate the knowledge collected in the project.
Impact: Application of this tool is expected to cover CAD requirements of the complete ESD relevant system of ESD stress source, protection, circuit and external load. Benefits from this tool are to achieve highest ESD reliability built in by design, shortest design cycle times due to the ability to respond flexibly to fast changing market requirements (i.e., stress models, failure thresholds, new processes) and reduction of costs due to the possibility of area minimization and yield optimization.
Exploitation: Project results are exploited in the form of commercialized software available from ISE and through advances in ESD circuit protection design from ST, Bosch and IMEC. ISE makes the envisaged enhanced tools commercially available, thus allowing other semiconductor manufacturers to take advantage of the improved know-how and to extend the main results of the present project to other semiconductor technologies. Industrial exploitation is done by Bosch and ST. They take advantage of the improved expertise in ESD circuit protection design until, at the end of the project, a commercialized tool covering industrial demands will be integrated in their design flow.
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