Case study 14 



Semiconductor Manufacturing for the 

 21st Century 



The results of applying a fully-scalable parallel iterative matrix solver to create a three-dimensional simula- 

 tion of current flow in a bipolar transistor are shown. The transistor was simulated on the Intel Delta at 

 Caltech using software developed at Stanford University. This simulation is the largest yet in this field and 

 represents the state of the art in three-dimensional device modeling. Such modeling efforts enable pro- 

 cess design in the "Virtual Factory. " 



Semiconductor manufacturing plants today are 

 characterized by high capital costs and low 

 flexibility. They are built to serve one or two 

 generations of technology and usually a narrow 

 product base. New technology development is 

 very expensive and largely empirically done. To 



be competitive in such an environment requires 

 high capital in\ cstmcnt. 



In the 1970s, chip designers faced similar invest- 

 ment problems because new designs were large- 

 ly hand crafted. As a result, few VLSI (Very 



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