1.5 Outline of the Thesis

My thesis is devoted to low power integrated circuit design. Using two- and three-dimen-sional TCAD tools, a high accuracy simulation environment is presented. This is necessary to handle short channel devices and advanced multilevel interconnect structures conveniently, as these issues strongly influence power dissipation and circuit performance.

The following chapter gives an overview of the semiconductor technology. Chapter 3 presents how layout data is manipulated in the VISTA TCAD framework. Chapter 4 outlines the causes of power comsumption in integrated circuits and how it can be reduced. Chapter 5 describes rigorous simulation techniques suitable for low-voltage, low-power integrated circuits. In Chapter 6 we deal with accurate three-dimensional capacitance and resistance/thermal simulations. Solid modeling techniques are presented here, as well. Several application examples of the proposed tools are presented in Chapter 7. A novel operational amplifier capable of 0.5 V power supply voltage operation is described in Chapter 8. The thesis concludes with a very brief discussion of the achieved results and gives some suggestions of future work.