MicroTec

Overview

MicroTec was designed as a perfect supplement to any book on semiconductor devices or processes — it lets students virtually build their own devices using a realistic process flow and test their performance. A limited-capability version was published by John Wiley & Sons as a supplement to Ton Mouthaan's Semiconductor Devices Explained in 2000.

Despite being simplified compared to its TCAD rivals, MicroTec outperforms many commercial tools on computationally intensive simulations of power semiconductor devices with large dimensions. It's also well suited to wide-bandgap materials such as SiC and GaN — it was used for several years at Cree Research for SiC device simulation — and has become a common choice for solar cell simulation over the last five to six years.

MicroTec traces back to the early-90s shift toward PC-based 2D/3D device modeling — memory and speed limits on the PCs of the day forced new numerical techniques, and those became the core of the package. From an engineer's perspective its most crucial feature is still robustness: it's user-friendly and needs very little RAM. The latest version adds a graphical device structure editor and non-planar device modeling.

For coursework, MicroTec's main draw is ease of use — it takes minimal effort to build a full tutorial in semiconductor device physics, giving students a realistic, hands-on introduction to modern device design. A fully functional demo of the current version is available to download.

What's included

• SiDif — 2D semiconductor process simulation: implantation, diffusion, oxidation, epitaxy
• SemSim — steady-state 2D semiconductor device simulation
• SibGraf — 2D and 1D simulation-result graphics
• TCAD Calculator — quick semiconductor device/process estimates

Supports MOSFET, SOI-MOSFET, DMOS, JFET, BJT, IGBT and Schottky devices, based on the diffusion-drift model with a finite-difference technique on a rectangular, auto-adjusting mesh. Despite its simplicity, MicroTec covers the essentials of process/device design with efficient, flexible graphics tools — a natural fit for managers, R&D engineers, students, professors and researchers alike, and often used simply as a TCAD calculator.

Screenshots