Geometry Manipulation Tools

The structure generation only through process simulation is often not necessary because for certain problems, the exact geometry description is not required if only intrinsic parameters of the devices are considered. Hence, to save CPU time, the device structures can be built by an analytical description of the solid, for examples by a particular sequence of layers with certain thicknesses or with a graphical editor by drawing the device structure.

• LAYGRID [39] has been developed at the Institute for Microlelectronics and is a three-dimensional device creation tool, which offers the possibilities to create three-dimensional device structures by extrusion of layer defined either by polygons or mask informations.
• VGMODELER [302] is a three-dimensional solid modeling tool which has been developed at the Institute for Microlelectronics. This geometry tool uses descriptions of solids and boolean operations to construct device structures. The resulting geometry description conveniently allows to include slanted walls and fully parameterized configuration descriptions.
• SSE [40] is graphical, three-dimensional solid modeler from SYNOPSYS which allows to include mask layer definitions and to extrude certain layers in the third dimension.
• CUTTER represents a suite of several shell scripts and software tools from several software vendors as well as from the Institute for Microlelectronics. These tools are necessary to cut two-dimensional slices from three-dimensional simulation results to allow a better inspection and an automatic data manipulation for simulation frameworks to automatically extract distributed quantities at certain planes or positions. Most of these scripts are provided with the distribution of the certain simulation tools and can be combined in the optimization environment SIESTA.