- As all CMOS robustness topics are related to the basic CMOS devices and their operation, an in-depth knowledge of the most important fundamentals of CMOS physics, CMOS device and circuit operation, fabrication and design are necessary to ease the understanding of the robustness topics. For that reason time the first part of the forum will concentrate on the topics that have to do with CMOS physics, devices, circuits, fabrication and design, such as:
CMOS device physics including the basic MOS device operation of nMOS and pMOS transistors, transistor current expression, the MOS diode and the MOS capacitor, the temperature dependence of the devices, the effect of the continuous scaling of CMOS technology and its problems, such as mobility reductions and leakage mechanisms,
CMOS process technology including the basic CMOS process flow, advanced planar and FinFET technologies,
CMOS circuit design, including basic logic gates, cell libraries, design flow and terminology. - The robustness of advanced CMOS integrated circuits. The second part of the forum includes a lot of CMOS problems that can show up as artefacts in the final captured image. Most of the imaging engineers are familiar with the effects on a display or hard-copy, but what can be root cause of the image quality problems? Topics that will be discussed in the forum are:
Signal integrity issues such as cross-talk, signal propagation, interference between ICs, current peaks, supply noise, substrate and ground bounce, on-chip decoupling capacitors and design consequences,
Variability issues including difference between random variations and systematic variations, causes of process parameter spread, proximity effects, random dopant fluctuations, transistor matching and design consequences
Reliability issues and topics such as electro-migration, latch-up, hot-carrier effects, NBTI, soft-errors (by cosmic rays and alpha-particles), electro-static discharge, etc.
The 2016 Harvest Imaging Forum will include a copy of: “Nanometer CMOS ICs, from Basics to ASICs” (Springer 2016) and “Bits on Chips” (Springer, 2016), as well as a hard copy of all sheets presented.
