Process management and design for MEMS and microelectronics technologies

Taking into account the tendency towards higher integration based on sophisticated technologies in microelectronics or the use of specific process steps for the realization of MEMS it becomes evident that the impact of properties and parameters from fabrication processes are getting more and more important. For long the interface between the design domain and the process domain was simply expressed in design rules sets. With the use of high resolution and new IC technology steps the interface gets more complex. As far as MEMS are concerned the technology issues are too dominating for fixed interfaces to the design. Novel approaches are necessary to support future design tasks in the area covered by process development on the one hand and application/structure design on the other hand, considering structural design specifications as well as process flow requirements. This; paper describes the development of a process design and management environment that supports process engineers and designers to determine valid process step sequences for specific applications and to derive all characterization data from process flows that are relevant for design stages. This environment (acronym PRINCE) is developed in cooperation with a major European MEMS foundry. It is based one a common data base where all process steps and their characterizations as well as derived rules are stored. Users are able to compose process flows on a graphical editor. Consistency violations such as missing or wrong placed process steps within a complete process flow will automatically be detected. Future work will integrate algorithms to optimize process flows.