| AVS 59th Annual International Symposium and Exhibition | |
| Electronic Materials and Processing | Thursday Sessions |
| Session EM-ThM |
| Session: | Processing for Ultra Low Power Electronics + Semiconductor Heterostructures I |
| Presenter: | M. Emam, Incize, Belgium |
| Authors: | M. Emam, Incize, Belgium J.-P. Raskin, Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium |
| Correspondent: | Click to Email |
Portability and performance are becoming the main two keywords in any consumer or professional applications. Portable computers, mobile phones, handheld measurement instruments, and many other examples are all applications that need long battery lifetime while compromising the least at the performance level. Long battery lifetime is simply translated into less power consumption and hence operating at lower voltage schemes. This new approach requires solutions at all levels; including material, fabrication, device structure, circuit design, and system architecture. Wideband characterization is the bridge that links these levels together (especially material, fabrication and device structure levels) and provides the means to optimize this cycle of innovation for an optimized final product in the Low Voltage Low Power (LVLP) regime.
Wideband characterization is the process of measurement and extraction of many parameters of the Device-Under-Test (DUT) in order to fully understand its characteristics and be able to provide solutions for inconvenient performance aspects. Wideband characterization usually covers a wide range of frequency starting at a few Hz and going up to tens of GHz, depending on the characteristics to be studied. Recently, many high frequency techniques have been proposed to deeply understand and qualify new materials (especially wafers and substrates) and new devices (active devices such as transistors and passive devices such as inductors). These new techniques rapidly and efficiently define the advantages and the disadvantages of the material/device and precisely define the causes of malfunction or poor quality performance. The result is a shorter time-to-market thanks to less number of iterations between the different steps of final product fabrication.
This paper presents the importance of wideband characterization techniques for fabrication process. Examples are given for new substrate, new device structures and enhancement of existing and mature device structures. The objective is an optimized performance for a LVLP application.