Feb 8, 2007

SISPAD 2007

The 2007 International Conference on Simulation of Semiconductor Processes and Devices (SISPAD) will be held this year in Vienna (Sept 25-27 2007), organized by TU-Wien (Technische Universität Wien). SISPAD is considered one of the top conference on device and process simulation.

You can find all the information in:

www.sispad.org

The topics of SISPAD include all kinds of modeling techniques.

I want to remark that, according to the CFP, one of the topics is "Compact device modeling for circuit simulation".

For compact model developers, SISPAD can be a very attractive forum to present new developments and results, and to interact with researchers working in numerical and predictive process and device simulation.

Besides, there are two interesting companion workshops:
1) Workshop on Electromigration Reliability (Sept 24)
2) Workshop on Organic Electronics (Sept 28)

Of course, it is also a good opportunity to enjoy the wonderful city of Vienna!

How many angels can dance on top of a pin?

Two weeks ago I was in Rome, in the ITC. As you can guess from the title, I had a quite interesting, but byzantine, discussion. I was presenting a paper (with B. Iniguez, M. Shur and some other people) about a universal procedure to model TFT. The core idea of the procedure is using a compact model to model an intrinsic device, and then model all the rest of the parasitic elements as lumped elements. The other guy was telling me that this is not physical. Obviously, I don't agree. Moreover, I think that using lumped elements is near as physical as it can get.
My point is: it is OK trying to put everything inside your equations. However, this usually leads to a loss of insight on what is happening in the field-effect device. I think it is better to model the device with as much accuracy as possible and without losing the insight, and then add as many elements as necessary as lumped elements. Thus, the resulting model will have a quite straight physical representation, easy to grasp by intuition, and will not lose precision due to any approximation. Moreover, the simulator will handle quite effectively the model, because it has been programed to do so. Probably, it will even behave better, because the equations will be easier to handle.
Anyway, it is only my opinion, and there are some argements in the other side that I'll discuss another day.