Semiconductor Process Simulation - History

History

The history of commercial process simulators began with the development of the Stanford University Process Modeling program . Building upon this beginning with improved models SUPREM II and SUPREM III were developed. Technology Modeling Associates, Inc. (TMA) which was formed in 1979 was the first company to commercialize SUPREM III. Later Silvaco also commercialized SUPREM and named the product ATHENA. TMA commercialized SUPREM-IV (2D version) and called it TSUPREM4. In 1992, Integrated Systems Engineering (ISE) came out with the 1D process simulator TESIM and the 2D process simulator DIOS. At about the same time development of a new 3D process and device simulator began at TMA and after TMA was acquired by Avanti, the product was released in 1998 as Taurus. Around 1994 a first version of the Florida Object Oriented Process Simulator (FLOOPS) was completed. FLOOPS was later commercialized by ISE in 2002. One other process simulator PROPHET was created around 1994 at Bell labs which later became Agere, but has not been sold commercially. In 2002 Synopsys acquired Avant!, corp. and in 2004 Synopsys acquired ISE. Synopsys has announced that a new process simulator will be released in mid-2005 combining the best features of Taurus, TSUPREM4, into the FLOOPS platform and will be called Sentaurus Process. SILVACO Procucts are ATHENA for 2D Process simulation, ATLAS for 2D Device Simulation, Victory Process /device for 3D Simulation. Besides these simulators, there are numerous other university and commercial simulators such as PROMIS, PREDICT, PROSIM, ICECREM, DADOS, TITAN, MicroTec, DOPDEES, ALAMODE.