A cellular automaton methodology for the simulation of integrated circuit fabrication processes

Abstract This paper presents a methodology for the simulation of physical processes with local interactions using cellular automata. Such processes are common in integrated circuit fabrication, and their simulation presents one of the most difficult problems in developing technology computer aided design (TCAD) systems. The simulated integrated circuit fabrication processes considered are lithography, oxidation, and deposition processes. The proposed methodology establishes the ability to capture the essential features of these integrated circuit fabrication processes and to translate them into a suitable form, in order to obtain an effective cellular automaton model, for each process. Several numerical experiments were carried out, in this work, using the cellular automaton algorithms obtained, and their results were found to be in very good agreement with published experimental results. Furthermore, cellular automaton algorithms exploit the inherent parallelism of the cellular automaton model and run fast on serial computers.

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