4.4 Control Level

The control level takes care of all aspects of tool invocation and tool run-time management:

1. Command line assembly.
2. Input deck generation.
3. Input and output redirection for establishing communication links and for message and error logging.
4. Tool invocation.
5. Return code interpretation
6. Extraction of results from output files.
7. Interpretation of diagnostic messages.

One fundamental problem in TCAD tool integration is caused by the fact that many simulators understand complex input deck languages that are rather difficult to represent on the framework level in a uniform manner. Therefore, we treat each functional subset of a simulator as a separate task-level application(cf. Section 4.1.3). For each fabrication process we define an application that appears to the framework as an independent tool. The application is accessed by calling a binding function that reads resources derived from local and global settings.

 
• 4.4.1 Binding Function
• 4.4.2 Tool Resources
• 4.4.3 Input Deck Templates
• 4.4.4 Tool Description