Module 1: Basic properties of semiconductors

 

Syllabus

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• Overview of conduction and valence bands in semiconductors.

• Carrier statistics, Fermi level and its dependence on doping density.

• Drift and diffusion of carriers,

• Carrier recombination and generation,

• Continuity equation, minority carrier lifetime and diffusion length, majority and minority current flow. Photoconductivity.

• Discussion on III/V direct band-gap semiconductors,  nitride (GaN)  

• Silicon carbide (SiC) which is also used in semiconductor electronics devices that operate at high temperatures or high voltages.

 

TCAD Laboratory

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This laboratory serves as an introduction to the Sentaurus Workbench and the tools utilized to achieve the simulation and analysis included in this course. TCAD is an abbreviation for Technology Computer-Aided-Design and Sentaurus is a TCAD workbench that utilizes various software tools for simulation and statistical analysis. It provides a graphical user interface (GUI) that unifies all the tools into one project flow. Some of the most used tools are the Structure Editor (SDE), Sentaurus Process simulation (SProcess) and Sentaurus Device simulation (SDevice). For visualization, there are two main tools, Sentaurus Visual (SVisual) and inspect. For generating structures SDE is used as a general structure generator, whereas SProcess is used to simulate the process of manufacturing the device as well.