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PROJECTS
AFFILIATED FACULTY
AFFILIATED LABORATORY
RESEARCH GRANTS
- NSF
- DARPA
- AFOSR
- IBM
- INTEL
- Advanced Micro Devices
- MIT Lincoln Laboratory
- CIPA
AFFILIATIONS
- Analog Devices, Inc.
- IBM
- Intel
- Advanced Micro Devices
- Shipley
- Micron
- KLA
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MICRO and NANO ELECTRONICS
The microelectronics industry has undergone nearly four decades of essentially exponential, manufacturable product improvement. To support this claim, probably the most publicized success of the industry has been "Moore's law," which observes that roughly every three years or less, the number of devices on a single DRAM chip has increased by a factor of four. With this increase has come correspondingly smaller devices, faster switching speeds, and equally as dramatic lower prices per semiconductor device, down by about six orders of magnitude from original transistor device prices. This amazing example of product improvement may well be unprecedented in the history of humankind.
Undoubtedly much of the success of this industry has occurred because of the richness of possible innovations in semiconductor technology for overcoming technical barriers in the continued quest to shrink device sizes. The industry is now preparing to make the transition from this now well-established field of microelectronics to that of the nanoscale regime, where expectations are that quantum mechanical principles will become key to successful new types of device operations. How these innovations can be made in a manufacturable manner is a key interest of our research group.
Our research has largely concentrated on the specific, yet broad, area of developing and applying simulation methods to aid the development and manufacturability of micro- and now nano-electronic products. The main focus has been to use knowledge of engineering, physics, mathematics, chemistry, and algorithms to encapsulate the behavior of complicated systems, particularly in micro and nano-electronics, within simulation programs to aid research and development of "high tech" products like microchips. In many cases, the use of this work has changed the status of a technology from being purely of novel/academic interest, to that of a viable manufacturable entity. Well done simulation development and application can enormously reduce expensive experimental costs. Our interests extend from the very phenomenological description, where models are deduced that are fairly empirical and reliant on detailed calibration, to physically fundamental types of models that require less calibration and measurement, are more predictive, but are also typically far more computationally intensive.
Past and current projects have spanned a wide range of micro- and nanolithographic processes and techniques, plus metrology, novel devices, electromagnetics, carrier transport, complex device behavior, and semiconductor processes.
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