One of the applications that could potentially spawn from
VISTA/SFC at its present state would take care
of all simulation and data manipulation carried out on
PIF wafer data.
Conceptually, all simulation tools, gridding tools, and
auxiliary tools (cf. Appendix
C) operating on PIF data
form a PIF wafer processor that encapsulates wafer model
manipulations and
mediates between process simulation requests and wafer data
manipulation. It acts as a server for all physical and non-physical
wafer model operations (Figure 10.1).
The server paradigm
effectively enhances the file-based tool integration and data exchange
approach as it is able to maintain context information during
sequences of operations that would otherwise be lost.
Figure 10.1:
PIF Wafer Processor.
Furthermore, calibration data can be down-loaded to the wafer processor to tune it to measurements obtained from the fab. For practical purposes, inserting calibration data into the data flow to the simulation tools could be done in a pre-processing module (Figure 10.2). Calibration can be implemented as outlined in Sections 4.5 and 8.8.
Figure 10.2:
Calibration pre-processor for PIF Wafer Processor.