The VISTA/SFC simulation environment has been designed to support different stages of TCAD process development, from tool development and process design to automatic scheduling and parallelization of split-lot experiments. The automatic simulation of process flows on a computer network using a variety of heterogeneous simulation tools represents the main objective of this work.
Process flows are submitted for simulation either from the
graphical user interface, from a text terminal, or from a batch file.
In visual mode, a comfortable interface is used to
access the run control module and the run data base.
Due to the
asynchronous nature of the operation of the framework, all user
interactions are fully available during active simulations. Moreover,
process flow simulations can also be requested by other applications
in a client-server manner.
For instance a series of process simulation runs
may be requested by a design-of-experiments module or an external optimizer,
which are notified upon completion to read the generated
wafer data and extracted parameters for further processing
.