Reddit reviews Semiconductor Material and Device Characterization

Where/how you figure this out?

By 1) getting into semiconductor processing and process design, 2) getting into device modeling, and 3) becoming an analog IC designer - and, of course, working in the semiconductor industry. In school you focus on upper division and graduate classes in these areas.

Generally you need all three to understand this area well. That's kind of how I fell into it. Leading edge analog design quickly becomes limited by the specifics of your simulation models and your specific process implementation. Usually parameters of process and device become factor in your analog circuit design and you may even adjust physical CAD layout to tweak them.

This is where SPICE models come in. Basically you keep getting new ones added to CAD systems over the last 40 years because of some corner that isn't well modeled. The simplest models (like MOS 1->3 and Gummel-Poon) worked OK for very large devices 40 years ago when SPICE was invented but process shrinks have created lots of nonidealities since (which is the nonideality? the device or the model? :-) ). Nature of the beast.

The simple fact however is that you can never get a device model to actually cover all corners of operation equally well. Such a model doesn't exist and probably never will.

Instead the reality is that you generally need fairly peaked experts extracting parameters and often even creating new models with the caveat that you always have to compromised on the model extraction accuracy to fit the particular application corner you are designing to.

So, for example, if are doing high power, you'll optimize one of the standard models for that corner and sacrifice low power accuracy or vice versa. If you are doing RF/uW devices, you make a different set of compromises than you would if you were doing digital or LF linear. In 40 years it's never become turn-key and automated - the degrees of freedom in the models generally don't properly match those of reality. Too many or too few cause problems with the extraction.

There are other areas related to SPICE model extraction that are very similar with just a small change of emphasis.

These include parametric process measurement which monitors each fabrication step using end-of-line analog testing of specialized test structures. This is more focused with manufacturing process control and device operational integrity "out the door". A side area to this is reliability testing - when with the devices fail in the field (and they will fail). Bread and butter to me. Been doing stuff in this general area for most of my career.

Some books on my shelf are the following (they are so common they are usually referred to by the author's name):

Physics of Semiconductor Devices (Sze)

MOS (Metal Oxide Semiconductor) Physics and Technology (Nicollian/Brews)


Semiconductor Device Modeling with Spice (Kielkowski)

SPICE: Practical Device Modeling (Antognetti)

Semiconductor Material and Device Characterization (Schroder)

Failure Mechanisms in Semiconductor Devices (Amerasekera/Najm)

Failure Modes And Mechanisms In Electronic Packages (Singh/Viswanadham)

You can also hang out at /r/chipdesign which is probably the closest subreddit to this area. I'm a moderator there.