Fabrication of P-Channel MOSFETs and Diffused Resistors
		     ChE/EE 4752

Semiconductor integrated circuits (ICs) are the major driving force behind technological breakthroughs and innovative product development in electronics today. ICs are fabricated by a sophisticated series of processes steps, which can range in number from dozens to even hundreds, depending on the complexity of the IC. Although a complete education in the field of semiconductor manufacturing requires students to have a good understanding of all phases of the fabrication process, IC fabrication requires an unusually diverse familiarity with physics, inorganic chemistry, semiconductor devices, and statistics. The theoretical background material regarding semiconductors is typically covered by a variety of courses in the Electrical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Materials Engineering, and Physics curricula.

However, the opportunity for student training in the more practical and "hands-on" aspects of semiconductor processing is often limited by space, equipment, and/or budget constraints. Therefore, university laboratory courses which provide students with the opportunity to fabricate ICs in an actual cleanroom environment are rare, despite significant student interest. Here at the Georgia Tech Microelectronics Research Center, for example, such a course has been developed, but at an initial cost of over $1M and an ongoing annual cost of approximately $50K. Due to this somewhat daunting level of expense, many universities, especially those which do not explicitly focus on engineering, are not able to offer such courses to their students, despite the high demand for these skills in the electronics job market.

In order to alleviate the impediments resulting from resource constraints and to enhance the educational experience of the students, we are currently developing a means to augment the existing hands-on lab by teaching microelectronic processing using interactive multimedia techniques. The overall vision is to develop a Virtual Cleanroom, in which a student can sit at a high-performance multimedia workstation (equipped with the necessary audio, video and graphics capability) and follow a semiconductor wafer all the way through a processing sequence, from bare silicon to finished IC.

With seed funding from the Graphics, Visualization and Usability (GVU) Center and the Georgia Tech Foundation, work has been initiated to construct simulation modules for each of the unit process steps used in microelectronics fabrication on the X-Mosaic platform. The primary advantage of X-Mosaic over other multimedia systems is that it runs under the Unix operating system and potentially allows the integration of any software package which conforms to the X/Motif standard, which is popular on university campuses and within industrial research environments. This makes the Virtual Cleanroom courseware remotely accessible over the Internet via the World-Wide Web. This also means that we have the potential for incorporating a variety of software (i.e. - process simulators such as SIMPL) into the Virtual Cleanroom, making it possible for the student to simulate the results of performing a process at the same time they are viewing the actual fabrication steps involved. Initial feedback from students who have viewed demonstrations of the Virtual Cleanroom has been very positive.