Challenge: Rapid idea verification

A variety of uncertainties and hurdles challenge the development of new manufacturing processes. The diversity of technology options and their constraints, the shrinking geometries and other external and internal forces put technologies and engineers easily to their limits. Already in the first phase of device and process development many good ideas are scrapped. There is simply not enough time to do the necessary research and explore the solution space sufficiently. Often successful concepts are not considered further. Therefore potentially successful products are never developed. This limits the ability of organizations to innovate.

Solution:

Software tools are required allowing rapid idea verification in a rapid prototyping fashion. This will enable engineers to evaluate more potentially successful ideas. For these initial verification steps only rough sketches and coarse grain checks are sufficient. This allows the engineer to eliminate unsuccessful ideas and focus on the promising ideas and approaches. XperiDesk offers the flexibility to easily draw reuseable device geometries (using small layout editors rather than full fledged GDS-Editors or PowerPoint) and assemble prototypes of the manufacturing process by simple drag&drop. Additionally it is possible to design the manufacturing process initially on an abstract level. For that a selection of a process step type or class e.g. etching is enough to already be able to produce a 2D or 3D preview of the device. Process step types / classes can later be exchanged by more detailed process step descriptions. This can again be used by more precise simulation tools (up to FEM TCAD simulation) to enhance the quality of the simulation. XperiSims open interface to integrate external simulation software enables efficient structural assessments of designed devices. All simulation results are tracked in a version management system. Combined with the robust support for the management of experimental verification data in XperiLink the results can be used for a continuous improvement of the development process.