Textbook

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Fabrication Engineering at the Micro- and Nanoscale

Oxford University Press, Fourth Edition

Preface:

The intent of this book is to introduce microelectronic and some aspects of nano-processing to a wide audience. I wrote it as a textbook for seniors and/or first-year graduate students, but it may also be used as a reference for practicing professionals. The goal has been to provide a book that is easy to read and understand. Silicon, GaAs, and GaN processes and technologies are covered, although the emphasis is on silicon-based technologies. The later sections also deal briefly with organic and thin film devices. The book assumes one year of physics, one year of mathematics (through simple differential equations), and one course in chemistry. Most students with electrical engineering backgrounds will also have had at least one course in semiconductor physics and devices including pn junctions and MOS transistors. This material is extremely useful for the last five chapters and is reviewed in the first sections of Chapters 16, 17, and 18 for students who haven’t seen it before or find that they are a bit rusty.

Microelectronics textbooks typically divide the fabrication sequence into a number of unit processes that are repeated to form the integrated circuit. The effect is to give the book a survey flavor: a number of loosely related topics each with its own background material. Distributed through each chapter of this book are reviews of the science that underlies the engineering. These sections, marked with an “°”, also help make the distinction between the immutable scientific laws and the applications of those laws, with all the attendant approximations and caveats, to the technology at hand. Optical lithography, for instance, may have a limited life, but diffraction will always be with us.

A second problem that arises in teaching this type of course is that the solution of the equations describing the process often cannot be done analytically. This text uses a widely used suite of simulation tools supplied commercially by SilvacoTM. These are “industry standards” and are provided at low cost to educational institutions. I have not been able to find equivalent open-source simulation tools. The software is intended to augment, not replace, learning the fundamental equations that describe microelectronic processing. The book also enriches the basic material with additional sections and chapters on process integration for various technologies and on more advanced processes. This additional material is in sections marked with a “+”. If time does not permit covering these sections, they may be omitted without loss of the basic content of the course.

 

About the Author

 

Errata

Fourth Edition

Third Edition