[webinar] Power WBG Semiconductor Technology Opportunities

"Power WBG Semiconductor Technology Opportunities"

webinar hosted by 

Dr. Victor Veliadis, 

Executive Director and CTO of PowerAmerica, 

a WBG semiconductor power electronics consortium

Event by Łukasiewicz - Institute of Microelectronics and Photonics

Register now: https://lukasiewiczimif.clickmeeting.com/poweramerica/register

Silicon power devices have dominated power electronics due to their excellent starting material quality, ease of fabrication, low-cost volume production, and proven reliability. However, they’re approaching their operational limits primarily due to their relatively low bandgap and critical electric field that results in high conduction and switching losses, and poor high-temperature performance. So what can we do? Well, let’s talk about the favorable WBG material properties, their volume application opportunities, and last but not least let's highlight the respective competitive advantages of SiC and GaN.

You will additionally learn about:

• the lateral and vertical power device configurations that will be analyzed in the context of bidirectional switching
• specific applications and needs for bidirectional switches
• key topologies, enabled by bidirectional switches
• PowerAmerica’s work to accelerate WBG power electronics commercialization

About Dr. Veliadis: Dr. Victor Veliadis is Executive Director and CTO of PowerAmerica, a WBG semiconductor power electronics consortium. At PowerAmerica, he has managed a budget of $146 million that he strategically allocated to 200 industrial and University projects to accelerate WBG semiconductor clean energy manufacturing, workforce development, and job creation. His PowerAmerica educational activities have trained 410 University FTE students in applied WBG projects, and engaged 4100 attendees in tutorials, short courses, and webinars. Dr. Veliadis is an ECE Professor at NCSU and an IEEE Fellow and EDS Distinguished Lecturer. He has 27 issued U.S. patents, 6 book chapters, and over 125 peer-reviewed publications. Prior to entering academia and taking an executive position at Power America in 2016, Dr. Veliadis spent 21 years in the semiconductor industry where his work included design, fabrication, and testing of SiC devices, GaN devices for military radar amplifiers, and financial and operations management of a commercial semiconductor fab. He has a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from John Hopkins University (1995).

[PhD] VLSI Interconnect Reliability

Shaoyi Peng

Modeling and Simulation Methods for VLSI Interconnect Reliability Focusing 

on Time Dependent Dielectric Breakdown

PhD Dissertation in Electrical Engineering

University of California Riverside

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/966241xk (March 2021)

Abstract: Time dependent dielectric breakdown (TDDB) is one of the important failure mechanisms for Copper (Cu) interconnects that are used in VLSI circuits. This reliability effect becomes more severe as the space between wires is shrinking and low-k dielectric materials (low electrical and mechanical strength) are used. There are many studies and theories focusing on the physics of it. However, there is limited research from the electronics design automation (EDA) perspective on this topic, aiming to evaluate, or alleviate it from the perspective of designing a VLSI chip. This thesis compiles several studies into evaluating TDDB on the circuit level, and engineering methods that help the evaluation. The first work extends the study of a published physics model on simplified yet practical cases. It simplifies the calculation of lifetime by deriving an analytic solution and applying fitting methods. The second study proposes a new way to evaluate lifetime of a chip by extending the models of simple interconnect structures to the complete chip. This method is more robust as it focuses more on a complete chip. However, heavy dependence of finite element method (FEM) makes the flow very slow. The third study adopts machine learning methods to accelerate this slow evaluation process. The proposed method is also applicable to other similar electrostatics applications. Last but not least, the fourth study focuses on a GPU based LU factorization algorithm, which, on a broader aspect, is a universal numerical algorithm used in many different simulation applications, which can be helpful to TDDB evaluations as it can be used in FEM.

Fig: Structure of two copper interconnect wires and the IMD in the cross-section SEM image after TDDB failure [sem]

REF: 

[sem] N. Suzumura, S. Yamamoto, D. Kodama, K. Makabe, J. Komori, E. Murakami, S. Maegawa, and K Kubota. A new TDDB degradation model based on Cu ion drift in Cu interconnect dielectrics. In IEEE Int. Reliability Physics Symposium (IRPS), pages 26–30, 2006.