INTEGRATED CIRCUITS

Maj Ahmad Naeem Akhtar Lec 1-2 11 Sep 2012

ahmadnaeem.akhtar@mcs.edu.pk

Military College of Signals National University of Sciences and Technology

WHAT WE MEAN BY IC
An IC consists of a single-crystal chip of Si , typically 50 by 50 mils in cross section, containing both active and passive elements. Such circuits are produced by the some processess used to fabricate individual transistors and diodes. These processes include epitaxial growth, masked impurity diffusion, oxide growth, and oxide etching, using photolithography for pattern definition. A method of batch processing is employed which offers excellent repeatability and is adaptable to the production of large no. of ICs at low cost.

IC TECHNOLOGY

Fabrication of ic is based on materials, processes, and design principles which constitute a highly developed semiconductor technology. The basic structure of an ic consists of four distinct layers of material.
1. 2. The bottom layer (6 mils thick) is p-type Si and serves as a Substrate upon which the IC is to be built. Thin n-type material which is grown as a single-crystal extension of the substrate. SiO2 and it also provides protection of semiconductor surface against contamination. In the region where difusion is to take place, the SiO2 layer is etched away, leaving the rest of the wafer protected against diffusion. To permit selective etching, the SiO2 Metallic (Al) layer is added to supply the necessary interconnections between the componenets.

3.

4.

Yield
No. of good chips per wafer Y 100 % Total number of chips per wafer Wafer cost Die cost Dies per wafer Die yield
wafer diameter/22 wafer diameter Dies per wafer die area 2 die area

Die Cost
Single die

Wafer
Going up to 12 (30cm)
5

The Significance of IC for Engineers

The aspects of IC those are distinct from discrete-circuit design The economics of IC provides an edge over conventional discrete circuit An understanding of device characteristics is therefore essential in designing good custom application-specific Ics(ASICs) This understanding is also very helpful when selecting commercially available Ics to implement a system design.

IC Structure
We will consider only Si-based technologies. Although GaAs is also used to implement VLSI chips, Si by far the most important material, featuring a wide range of cost-performance tradeoffs.

Si- Ending to a Single Piece of Material

Si is an abundant element, which occurs naturally in the form of sand. It can be refined using well-defined techniques of purification and crystal growth. Si also exhibits suitable physical properties for fabricating active devices with electrical characteristics. Moreover, Si can be easily oxidized to form an excellent insulator- SiO (glass). The native oxide is useful for constructing capacitors and MOSFETs. It also serves as a diffusion barrier that can mask against the diffusion of unwanted impurities into nearby highimpurity Si material

Si- Ending to a Single Piece of Material

This masking property of silicon oxide allows electrical properties of silicon to be easily altered in predefined areas. Therefore, active and passive elements can be built on the same piece of material or substrate. The components can then be interconnected using metal layers (similar to those used in PCB) to form a so-called monolithic IC essentially a single piece of material.

PRINCIPLES GOVERNING THE ELECTRICAL BEHAVIOUR OF SEMICONDUCTORS

Two types of mobile charge carriers are available.This bipolar nature of a conductor is to be contrasted with the unipolar property of a metal, which possesses only free electrons. A semiconductor may be fabricated with donor (acceptor) impurities; so it contains mobile charges which are primarily electrons (holes). The intrinsic concentration of carriers is a function of temperature, essentially all donors or acceptors are ionized.

Current is due to two distinct phenomena : Carriers drift in an electric field(this conduction current is also available in a metal) Carriers diffuse if a concentration gradient exists ( a phenomenon which does not take place in a metal).

Carriers are continuously being generated ( due to thermal creation of hole-electron pairs) and are simultaneously disappearing (due to recombination). The fundamental law governing the flow of charge is called the CONTINUTY EQUATION. It is formulated by considering that charge can neither be created nor destroyed if generation, recombination, drift and diffusion are all taken into account. If minority carriers ( say, holes ) are injected into a region containing majority carriers (say an n-type bar), then usually the injected minority concentration is very small compared with the density of the majority carriers. For this low level injection condition the minority current is predominantly due to diffusion. The total majority-carrier flow is the sum of a drift and a diffusion current. The majority conduction current results from a small electric field internally created within the

LITHOGRAHY

Lithography is the process of transferring patterns of geometric shapes in a mask to a thin layer of radiation-sensitive material (called resist) covering the surface of a semiconductor wafer.

PROCESS OF LITHOGRAPHY

STEPS IN FABRICATING ICs

Crystal growth of a substrate Epitaxial Silicon Dioxide Growth Photoetching Diffusion Vacuum evaporation of aluminium

ELECTRONICS CONFIGURATION IN GROUP IV A

Electrical Properties of Ge and Si

ADVANTAGES OF ICs
Low cost Small size High reliabilty Improved Performance

IC DESIGN PHILOSOPHY
IC fab tech poses constraints on - and provides opportunity to the cct designer. Thus, while chip-area consideration dictate that large- and even moderate-value resistors to be avoided. Constant-current sources are readily available. Large capacitors are not available, otherwise the no. of chip terminals and hence its cost increases. Very small capacitors, in the pf and fraction of picofarad range, however, are easy to fabricate in IC MOS technology and can be combined with MOS amplifiers and MOS switches to realize a wide range of signal processing functions, both analog and digital.

SPICE Simulation Result

Using these technique s, it is possible to produce transistors, diodes, resistors, capacitors, and aluminium interconnection on the same chip