Free Keithley Web Seminar on Measurement

This seminar covers precision test and measurement applications for an emerging class of low cost (<$1000 USD) 6½-digit digital multimeters. Learn how to assemble a testing error budget for various applications for electronic devices and products. Examples include simple test programming to support automatic acquisition and evaluation of measurement data, as well as basic front panel operation.

By participating in this seminar, you will learn and understand:

• How to establish a measurement accuracy budget for an application
• How to account for central and parasitic sources of error
• How to match your accuracy requirements with the appropriate DMM
• How to calculate system test uncertainties and errors

This seminar is recommended for development and test engineers and scientists who need to make high precision electrical measurements using widely available, highly accurate 6½-digit DMMs.

About the Presenter:

Chuck Cimino is the Marketing Director for Multi-Application Instruments at Keithley Instruments, Inc. in Cleveland, Ohio. He joined Keithley Instruments in 1981 and has held many positions, including Test Engineer, Design Engineer, Project Manager, and Product Marketer.
The seminar will be broadcasted over the internet and requires your registration prior to the event.

When is it?

Europe:

Thursday, September 13, 2007 15:00 Central European Time (UTC/GMT: 13:00)

To register for this FREE webcast seminar click here.

Primer Seminario en Nanoelectrónica y Diseño Avanzado 2007

A friend of mine (Francisco J. Garcia Sanchez) has sent me the announcement of the first Seminar on Nanoelectronics and Advanced Design to be held at the INAOE in Puebla, Mexico. Here you have the link: http://www-elec.inaoep.mx/castour2007

The program is VERY interesting, with five stellar speakers, and, best of all, the admision is free...

P R O G R A M

Dr. Francisco J. Garcia Sanchez, /Universidad Simón Bolivar, Caracas, Venezuela
De la Microelectrónica a la Nanoelectrónica: Una Visión de la Evolución de los Dispositivos Electrónicos.

Prof. Krishnendu Chakrabarty, /Duke University, USA
Modular Testing of Core-Based System-on-Chip Integrated Circuits.

Prof. Rajendra Singh, /Clemson University, South Carolina, USA
Nanotechnology and Pathways to Green Energy Conversion

Prof. Naveen K. Yanduru , /Design Manager, Texas Instruments, Inc. Dallas, Tx, USA
Front-ends in deep sub-micron CMOS with an example of a WCDMA, GSM/GPRS/EDGE receiver front-end without inter-stage SAW filter in 90nm CMOS.

Dr. Mauricio Terrones, /Advanced Materials Department, IPICyT, San Luis Potosí, México.
Recent Advances on N-doped Carbon Nanotubes: Applications and Biocompatibility

For more information:
Dr. J. Alejandro Díaz
ajdiaz@inaoep.mx
Tel y Fax: (222) 2470517

Agilent Announces New HVMOS Package For IC-CAP Software

I copy part of the press release (please note the language they use):

Agilent Technologies Inc. announced the availability of a new parameter extraction solution for high voltage (HV) complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) devices used in a range of automotive and consumer products, as well as LCD and display driver applications. The HVMOS extraction package, for use with Agilent's Integrated Circuit Characterization and Analysis Program (IC-CAP) software platform, enables engineers to model HV CMOS devices using Synopsys' HSPICE simulator, HVMOS Level 66 compact model.

Implemented as a compact model in HSPICE, HVMOS Level 66 compact model outperforms most other HVMOS model solutions in speed and convergence. The HVMOS model includes all relevant physical effects unique to high-voltage operation, including symmetric and asymmetric source and drain resistances, quasi-saturation, transconductance fall off at high-gate voltage, and self-heating effects. As a result, it allows HV CMOS devices to be modeled with unparalleled DC and capacitance modeling accuracy and simulation speed. HVMOS models are used by both analog and digital designers during circuit simulation.

Source: Semiconductor Online

Statistical simulation of memories

In the last issue of electronics letters (August 2 2007, vol 43, issue 16), there is an interesting paper on statistical simulation of sub-100nm memories. Here you have the link to the abstract, and try to have a look at it. I think that this (I mean: incorporating statistical techniques into the whole model) is an issue for a good compact model to be accepted by the design community.
Otherwise, if there is no way to take into account the huge variations in modern technologies, the model will be quite useless for them.

Scaling effects on short-channel organic transistors

If you are interested in organic transistors, perhaps you will appreciate having a look at the paper "Scaling effect on the operation stability of short-channel organic single-crystal transistors", appeared in the Applied Physics Letters of 6 August 2007 (link).
As they say in the abstract: "Organic single-crystal transistors allowed the authors to investigate the essential features of short-channel devices. Rubrene single-crystal transistors with channel lengths of 500 and 100 nm exhibited good field-effect characteristics under extremely low operation voltages, although space charge limited current degrades the subthreshold properties of 100 nm devices. Furthermore, bias-stress measurements revealed the remarkable stability of organic single-crystal transistors regardless of device size. The bias-stress effect was explained by the trapping of gate-induced charges into localized density of states in the single-crystal channel."

ISCAS'08

The 2008 IEEE International Symposium of Circuits and Systems (ISCAS 2008) will be held in Seattle (Washington, USA), on 18-21 May 2008.

ISCAS is the largest conference in the area of Circuits and Systems. It is sponsored by the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society. Prestigeous speakers in this field are always invited.

ISCAS 2008 will focus on the theme "Green Circuits and Systems: Engineering the Environmental Revolution".

The deadline for regular paper submission is October 5 2007. As indicated in the Call for Papers, the scope of ISCAS 2008 includes all topics related to integrated circuits and systems. Papers on compact modeling for circuit design are considered to address some of the topic of the call. In fact, every year a number of interesting papers on compact modeling are presented at ISCAS.

It is important to mention that in ISCAS posters are very well considered, as important as oral presentations. Many authors choose poster as their presentation format.

On the other hand, a "rich and intersting social programme is planned". It still has to be announced. Sounds promising, anyway.

New papers about compact modeling

A number of interesting papers have been published in the August issue of Transactions on Electron Devices.

In a paper entitled "Accuracy of Surface-Potential-Based Long–Wide-Channel Thick-Base MOS Transistor Models", Bin B. Jie and Chih-Tang Sah (University of Florida, Gainesville) discuss the accuracy of several surface-potential based MOSFET models. They show that the accuracy of the approximations done in these models is not so good in the accumulation and subthreshold regimes, and they propose a new analytical model showing better accuracy in those regimes.

Ananda S. Roy, Christian C. Enz and J. -M. Sallese, researchers from the EKV team at EPFL (Lausanne, Switzerland) present an analytical noise modeling paradingm for lateral nonuniform MOSFETs. They show that in these devices the bias dependence of the noise parameters cannot be predicted by conventional Klaassen-Prins (KP)-based methods.

Modeling of irradiated devices is always a hot topic. H. T. Mebrahtu et al. present SPICE models of Fluorine-Ion irradiated CMOS devices, using the EKV MOSFET model as a basis.

In this issue we also find new modeling work on Double-Gate MOSFETs. Researchers from the University of Thessaloniki (Greece) and MINATEC (Grenoble, France) have presented a paper entitled "Semi-Analytical Modeling of Short-Channel Effects in Si and Ge Symmetrical Double-Gate MOSFETs". The doping is considered in this work. The analysis is carried out in the subthershold regime, and the mobile charge is assumed to be negligible compared to the doping charge. The model shows that Ge Double-Gate MOSFETs are more prone to short-channel effects than Si Double-Gate MOSFETs.

Finally, B. Bindu, N. DasGupta and A. DasGupta (Indian Institute of Technology, Madras) present "A Unified Model for Gate Capacitance–Voltage Characteristics and Extraction of Parameters of Si/SiGe Heterostructure pMOSFETs". This analytical model is physically-based, and shows very good agreement with experimental measurements.