The following chapter gives a more detailed account of the application of TCAD in industry and presents typical TCAD tasks and tools. Chapter 3 outlines the architecture of the VISTA/SFC simulation environment and discusses basic concepts and mechanisms. In Chapter 4, the tool integration methodology adopted is presented. Chapter 5 focuses on the representation of semiconductor process flows for simulation purposes, Chapter 7 deals with the management of simulation data for TCAD experiments. Chapter 8 presents the task level management and encapsulation mechanisms available in VISTA/SFC. A uniform representation of various TCAD tasks is described.
Chapter 9 sketches two typical TCAD analysis and synthesis tasks. Section 9.1 demonstrates the simulation of a complete CMOS fabrication process with heterogeneous simulation tools, Section 9.2 shows the automated interplay of task-level components to optimize a given process for a reduced short-channel effect. Finally, this thesis concludes with a brief discussion and gives some suggestions for future work.