In the early 90s Siborg Systems Inc. released MicroTec: a semiconductor device and process simulator that has become used by more than 140 Universities and more than 40 semiconductor companies for computationally extensive simulations. Siborg has recently made a new version available particularly targeting educational use of the software. Examples are created for a few popular semiconductor process and device text books including “Solid State Electronic Devices” by Ben Streetman, Sanjay Banerjee, Pearson Education, March 9, 2014; “Modern Semiconductor Devices for Integrated Circuits” by Chenming C. Hu, Pearson Education, March 22, 2009; and “Fabrication Engineering at the Micro- and Nanoscale” by Stephen A. Campbell, Oxford University Press, September 5, 2007.

Microtec is a significantly simplified semiconductor TCAD tool while still being a powerful modeling tool for industrial semiconductor process/device design. It is an efficient tool for computationally extensive simulations arising in modeling of power semiconductor devices with large dimensions, and is particularly useful for devices made of SiC, GaN and other materials with a wide bandgap.

The program was widely used in education, including Universities such as UC Berkeley, Waseda University, Tokyo Institute of Technology, and the University of Waterloo; it allows students to learn basic ideas about the modern semiconductor device design in a realistic model environment and create their own virtual devices using realistic process flow and test their performance. MicroTec is an easy-to-use simplified TCAD tool that can be learned Microtec within a few hours while still offering robustness and realistic semiconductor process and device simulation. The program also is an asset to those who need to understand the physics of semiconductor devices without knowing much about computers or numerical methods and who do not have much time for learning new process/device simulation tools.

A simplified limited version of MicroTec semiconductor device simulator was also published by John Wiley and Sons, 2000-02-08, in “Semiconductor Devices Explained: Using Active Simulation”, by Ton Mouthaan, Professor of the Twente University in the Netherlands.

MicroTec is able to simulate 2D silicon process modeling including epitaxy, oxidation, diffusion and implantation and 2D steady-state semiconductor device simulation including SOI-MOSFET, MOSFET, BJT, JFT,IGBT, DMOS, Schottky devices, Solar Cells, etc.

Based on the diffusion-drift model, Microtec employs finite difference technique on a rectangular, automatically generated mesh.

One of the features of MicroTec is the ability to run on virtually any PC. Being a true 32-bit application for Windows, MicroTec needs very little RAM allocation. With no memory threshold, the program can be even be run on computers with only a few Mbytes of memory if a modest number of mesh nodes is used. Typical simulation only take minutes of CPU time on a regular PC.

Microtec includes three main software tools:

• SiDif for 2D semiconductor process simulation including implantation, diffusion, oxidation and epitaxy
• SemSim for steady-state 2D semiconductor device simulation
• SiBGraf for 2D and 1D graphics