Dr.  Michael  Waltl
Institute for Microelectronics,  Austria

Title: Challenges for Robust Electronics Circuits and Devices

Abstract:

Electronic integrated circuits (ICs) have drastically influenced our society over the past decades and have become an indispensable part of our daily lives. With the continued integration of sensors with digital and analog ICs, this trend is only increasing. Integrated sensors can be found in every aspect of our every-day life, from health and safety monitoring to transport and automation. A central aspect for long-term failure-safe and stable operation of complex electrical circuits and applications, e.g., digital logic, wireless communication, and sensing, is the robustness, high performance, and reliable operation of the microelectronic components employed in these circuits. The requirements for the electronics are thereby strongly application-dependent. For instance, to fully exploit the sensitivity of available sensors, low intrinsic noise of the electronics used to control the device is critical. For SiC power transistors, as used for gas sensing in harsh environments, photovoltaic cells, and automotive applications, high carrier mobility is key to reducing losses in power conversion applications. However, electronic devices suffer from time-zero and time-dependent variability in their performance, which must be investigated in detail for these effects to be considered at an early stage of the circuit design process.
The root cause for transistors' non-ideality effects lies in imperfections at the atomic level, which can emerge as electrically active sites, so-called defects. These defects can become charged during operation, thereby altering the device characteristics. It should also be noted that device and circuit variability considerably increases for scaled technology nodes. To explore the origin of the defects in transistors, my research group has developed an in-house defect probing instrument to overcome the many limitations of experimentally available equipment, such as low SNR, long-term measurement stability issues, low sampling frequencies when high data accuracy is required, and many more.
This talk will address the challenges of robust electronic circuits, the most important properties affecting the reliability of FETs, and the variability issues in integrated circuits. The manner in which defects alter the behavior of devices and circuits will be discussed, and the means how they can be considered in circuit models and simulators will be described. Furthermore, various characterization techniques and the measurement tools which have been developed and employed for their characterization will be presented. Finally, a brief outlook about advanced simulation models to explore performance issues in Si and SiC technologies, but also to investigate novel devices, sensors, and circuits based on 2D materials is presented.

Biography:

Dr. Waltl is an Assistant Professor at the TU Wien, Vienna, Austria, and an IEEE Senior Member. His overall scientific focus is on the robustness of microelectronic devices and circuits. In this field, he investigates reliability issues – characterization and modeling – in semiconductor devices and circuits. Furthermore, Dr. Waltl has a strong background in measurement technology and is leading the development of novel characterization tools and techniques. He is the co-author or author of over 100 articles in journals and conference proceedings (h-index 24). Dr. Waltl is the director of the Christian Doppler Laboratory for single defect spectroscopy in semiconductor devices and leads the device characterization laboratory at the Institute for Microelectronics at the TU Wien. In addition, he is the principal investigator of several research projects funded by the FFG and has ongoing collaborations with various industrial partners, including ams-OSRAM AG, Infineon, and imec. He is the (co-)recipient of four best paper awards (IIRW2014, DRC2019, IIRW2019, IEDM2019), serves on the technical program and management committee of various international conferences and workshops, and is Associate Editor with the Microelectronics Engineering journal. Based on his expertise, Dr. Waltl is regularly invited as a reviewer of numerous renowned Journals, including IEEE TED, Microelectronics Reliability, Journal of Applied Physics, and many more.