SURGE Virtual Event Taiwan / Singapore 2023

Sessions

• Welcome and Introduction

  Dr. Babak Taheri, CEO and Board Member, Silvaco, Inc.

  Chiping Tu, General Manager, Silvaco Taiwan

  Zhao Qingda, Managing Director, Silvaco Singapore

  Speaker bio, November 2023

  CEO of Silvaco, and a director, for all but two months since August 2019. He first joined in October 2018 as CTO and Executive VP of Products. Before that he led Integrated Biosensing Technologies, an advisory and consulting firm, as its CEO. He holds a PhD in biomedical engineering from UC Davis and has chaired its electrical engineering department's advisory board.

  Speaker bio, November 2023

  General manager of Silvaco Taiwan. He joined in 2008 and has been responsible for sales of every Silvaco product in Taiwan since, as well as the local team. He studied at National Taiwan University (BS) and UT Austin (MS), both in electrical engineering.

  Speaker bio, November 2023

  Managing director of Silvaco Singapore, with sales for Singapore, Australia and Southeast Asia under him. He has been with Silvaco since 2005. Bachelor's and master's degrees from Nanyang Technological University's School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering.

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• Machine Learning: A New Revolution for EDA

  Patrick Groeneveld, Ph.D.

  Abstract

  Between a functional description and a mask pattern sits a long chain of EDA algorithms. Some are numerical solvers. Others are heuristics, kept because they work. Each has parameters engineers tune by hand, trading area against speed through relative costs.

  Some newer tools let machine learning find a design-specific parameter set instead. They run the flow over and over and read the gradients out of the PPA results. Research is going further, toward EDA tools built on ML from the start, for placement and for routing. Dr. Groeneveld maps where ML in EDA stands and what it could change over the next ten years.

  Speaker bio, November 2023

  At Magma Design Automation he was Chief Technologist, on the team that built an RTL-to-GDS2 synthesis product. He has also worked at Cadence, Synopsys and Cerebras. He held a full professorship in electrical engineering at Eindhoven. He now lectures in Stanford's EE department and is finance chair on the Design Automation Conference's executive committee. MSc and PhD from Delft University of Technology.

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• WBG Semiconductor For EV and AI Data Center

  郭浩中 (Hao-Chung Kuo), Chair Professor of NYCU, Director of HHR

  Speaker bio, November 2023

  His research is in photonics: semiconductor lasers, VCSELs, blue and UV LEDs, and solar cells. It adds up to over 400 journal papers and 45 granted patents. He joined National Chiao Tung University's Institute of Electro-Optical Engineering in 2002, after Bell Labs, Agilent Technologies and LuxNet. Fellow of the IEEE, OSA, SPIE and IET. PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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• Novel Dynamic Flash Memory and Key Shape Floating Body Memory

  Dr Li Yisuo, Unisantis Electronics Singapore Pte Ltd

  Speaker bio, November 2023

  Twenty-four years in TCAD, at GlobalFoundries, Synopsys and Global TCAD, and as a co-founder of Cogenda. At Unisantis since 2008, he led Surrounding Gate Transistor research from the 32nm node down to 1.5nm before turning to floating body memory. He holds 46 patents, and in 2021 he published the first 1.5nm-node SRAM paper at IMW.

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• TCAD Simulation Update

  Dr. Eric Guichard, SVP and GM of TCAD Business Unit, Silvaco, Inc.

  Abstract

  An update on Victory, Silvaco's TCAD simulation line, from the executive who runs it. Dr. Guichard also explains why TCAD matters to device development, then turns to where TCAD development is going.

  Speaker bio, November 2023

  He joined Silvaco Data Systems, the subsidiary now called Silvaco SA, in 1995, in roles that included applications engineering. VP of Applications from 2008, then SVP and general manager for TCAD from November 2012. Master's in materials science and a doctorate in semiconductor physics from the Institut Polytechnique de Grenoble.

  Products: TCAD

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• Silvaco Simulation Tools Assisting GaN-based Power Devices Design and Development

  Dr. Eldad Bahat-Treidel, Senior Scientist, Ferdinand-Braun-Institut

  Abstract

  Lateral GaN power devices are close to commercial maturity for switching up to the 650 V class. They still fall short of GaN's material limit on RDS(on)·A against breakdown voltage, though. Two device routes aim at that gap:

  • Vertical GaN transistors. They take less wafer area and cut RDS(on)·A by an order of magnitude, to 1.0 mΩ·cm². Strain-free homoepitaxy makes thick, lightly doped drift layers possible, for blocking above 1 kV.
  • Lateral HFETs on an AlN buffer. They should confine the channel more tightly, for stronger blocking and less dispersion.

  At FBH, Silvaco simulation runs through the design and analysis of both. Dr. Bahat-Treidel works through three cases:

  • GaN fin MISFET conductance, compared with measurement and predicted across geometry and epitaxial layers
  • Edge terminations for vertical devices, engineered with avalanche models and checked against experiment and theory
  • Trapping and detrapping effects that explain dynamic on-resistance in AlN/GaN HFETs
  Speaker bio, November 2023

  At the Ferdinand-Braun-Institut in Berlin since 2006, first developing high-voltage GaN switching transistors for power electronics and, from 2014, vertical GaN devices. He came to GaN from photolithography: process engineering at Intel, then R&D at Tower Semiconductor. PhD in electrical engineering from TU Berlin.

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• Going Beyond CMOS in Memories

  Debo Olaosebikan Ph.D., Co-Founder and CEO, Kepler Computing

  Abstract

  Kepler Computing works on design beyond CMOS, particularly for memory. Debo Olaosebikan covers why he and his co-founders started it and what it's building. He also shows how the team simulates its new memories in Silvaco TCAD.

  Speaker bio, November 2023

  Before Kepler he co-founded Gigster and served as its CTO. While working toward a physics PhD at Cornell, he led the university's work on an electric silicon laser, and he researched spintronics at IBM Almaden. Winner of the Future Africa Awards' Best Use of Science prize in 2011.

  Products: TCAD

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• Layout Design Automation for Heterogeneous Integration

  張耀文 (Yao-Wen Chang), Dean & Distinguished Professor National Taiwan University

  Abstract

  The economic case for moving on-chip integration to the next node keeps getting weaker, with EUV, masks and design all adding cost. So PPA gains increasingly come from More-than-Moore heterogeneous integration: separately made dies and components, assembled in a System-in-Package or across packages on a PCB.

  Laying those out is a different problem from chip layout. Shapes are arbitrary, metal widths and spacing rules vary, and thermal, mechanical, electrical, optical and system-level effects all interact. The traditional chip flow doesn't handle that well. Professor Chang surveys the integration options, how their layouts are modeled and the automation problems that follow. He then reviews the published techniques and the research questions still open.

  Speaker bio, November 2023

  Dean of NTU's College of EECS and a Distinguished Professor of electrical engineering. He was president of IEEE CEDA, the Council on Electronic Design Automation, in 2020 and 2021, the first from outside the US and Europe. He is a Fellow of both the ACM and the IEEE. His NTUplace placers became the engines inside commercial tools from SpringSoft and from Maxeda, a company he co-founded. Synopsys later acquired both.

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• TCAD Simulations of HFC-V for Characterization of Various Traps in SiO2/4H-SiC Interface

  Dr Lakshmi Kanta Bera, Institute of Microelectronics (IME), Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore

  Speaker bio, November 2023

  Senior Principal Scientist at IME, working on process integration for SiC power MOSFETs. Before SiC he worked on GaN-on-silicon and GaN-on-sapphire HEMTs and LEDs. Earlier still came advanced CMOS work at IME, and 40nm logic device design at SilTerra and Chartered Semiconductor. He has published over 100 technical articles, holds 19 patents and received the IEEE EDS George E. Smith Award.

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• GaN Device Modeling for Power and RF Applications with Industry Standard ASM-HEMT Compact Model

  Prof Sourabh Khandelwal, Macquarie University, Australia

  Abstract

  ASM-HEMT is one of the industry's standard compact models for GaN devices, in RF and in power. Professor Khandelwal goes through its core formulations and the device effects it captures. Then come ASM-HEMT models developed for commercial use in both areas, and what's new in the model.

  Speaker bio, November 2023

  The GaN HEMT model ASM-HEMT and the ESD diode model ASM-ESD are both industry standards, and he is lead author of each. Associate Professor at Macquarie University, with more than 100 papers and three books on device modeling and circuit simulation.

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• Advanced Parasitics Analysis Demonstration with Viso

  Ayoub HAGROU, Analog Design Engineer, STMicroelectronics

  Abstract

  Ayoub Hagrou of STMicroelectronics takes Viso through a real circuit design. Because Viso looks only at the RC parasitics, you get to the interconnects that hurt circuit behavior quickly. Along the way come timing estimates and a side-by-side comparison of netlists from different extractions.

  Speaker bio, November 2023

  Designs analog circuits for STM32 general-purpose microcontrollers in STMicroelectronics' MDG division.

  Products: Viso

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