Course Development in IC Manufacturing

Traditional curriculum in electrical engineering separates semiconductor processing courses from courses in circuit design. As a result, manufacturing topics involving yield management, and the study of random process variations impacting circuit behavior are usually vaguely treated. The subject matter of this paper is to report a course developed at Texas A&M University to compensate for the aforementioned shortcoming. This course attempts to link technological process and circuit design domains by emphasizing aspects such as process disturbance modeling, yield modeling, and defect-induced fault modeling. In a rapidly changing environment where high-end technologies are evolving towards submicron features and towards high transistor integration, these aspects are key factors to design for manufucturubility. The paper presents the course’s syllabus, a description of its main topics, and results on selected project assignments carried out during a normal academic semester.