Semiconductor wafer representation for TCAD

This paper describes the Semiconductor Wafer Representation (SWR) for representing and manipulating wafer state during process and device simulation. The goal of the SWR is to provide an object-oriented interface to a collection of functions designed for developing and integrating Technology CAD (TCAD) applications. By providing functions which can be common across many applications, we aim to greatly reduce tool development and integration time. Corporate, vendor, and university TCAD developers have worked together under the auspices of the CAD Framework Initiative to create an architecture and C++ programming interface for an SWR 1.0 draft standard. Here we will describe this architecture and the results of creating and using a prototype implementation of the standard both to integrate existing TCAD tools and to develop simple new tools.