• Skip to main content
  • LOG IN
  • REGISTER
Coventor_New_LogoCoventor_New_LogoCoventor_New_LogoCoventor_New_Logo
  • COMPANY
    • ABOUT
    • CAREERS
    • PRESS RELEASE
    • PRESS COVERAGE
    • EVENTS
  • PRODUCTS
    • SEMulator3D®
      Semiconductor Process Modeling
    • CoventorMP®
      MEMS Design Automation
      • CoventorWare®
      • MEMS+®
  • SOLUTIONS
    • SEMICONDUCTOR SOLUTIONS
    • MEMS SOLUTIONS
  • RESOURCES
    • CASE STUDIES
    • BLOG
    • VIDEOS
  • CONTACT
  • SUPPORT
Contact Us
✕
  • Home
  • Coventor Blog
  • The Unsung Heroes of CoventorWare
Semicon West attracts the entire value chain to address 3D chip manufacturing challenges
July 23, 2014
Breakthrough MEMS Models for System and IC Designers
September 7, 2014

The Unsung Heroes of CoventorWare

Published by Coventor at August 4, 2014
Categories
  • Coventor Blog
Tags
  • CoventorMP

The CoventorWare 2014 release has been announced and is now available to customers. I presided over the first release of CoventorWare in 2001 and eight major releases since then with numerous updates in between. With each release, we added new capabilities, and capacity, speed, and accuracy improvements to address the ever more demanding requirements of our users. The new capabilities and performance improvements in each release are easy to talk about and receive all the glory. In this respect, CoventorWare 2014 is no different: the highlights are covered in our press release; I won’t repeat them here. Instead, I want to talk about the steady improvements in the usability, robustness and quality of the software and the documentation. These improvements aren’t as glamorous as the shiny new stuff, but I believe they really matter to users. Our quality assurance team and our documentation team deserve a lot of credit for these improvements. They’re the unsung heroes of CoventorWare.

CoventorWare is a Swiss Army knife for MEMS design and analysis. In order to address the wide variety of MEMS devices and physics, it has lots of different analysis capabilities, certainly far more than any one user ever needs. The challenge in developing this software suite has been to strike a balance between providing users with flexibility to address different kinds of MEMS while constraining user input and use cases to paths that “make sense”. Good tools have enough flexibility that users can solve problems that the developers never conceived. For example, a user recently found that CoventorWare’s MemMech solver was more efficient than its MemElectro solver for extracting the parasitic capacitance of a piezomechanical device with an extraordinarily high dielectric constant. We never thought of MemMech as a tool for parasitic extraction, but fortunately we didn’t build in constraints to prevent it, either. On the other hand, without some constraints a user has too many ways to “shoot himself (herself) in the foot”.

The question is: what happens when a user provides inputs that are incompatible or don’t make sense? Does the software crash or, worse, does the user lose valuable data? Does the user get an indecipherable warning or error message? As developers, we strive for no crashes or data loss, and we spend a lot of time providing warning and error messages that clearly indicate the cause of a problem and provide a hint about a possible solution. It would be nice to get all this right with release 1.0, but the reality of software development is that there’s no substitute for baking in years of user experience from a series of releases. With each release, our quality assurance team identifies and tests many of the “corner cases” that the developers never conceived, and makes sure that the software stays alive and provides useful warning or error messages. With so many new releases since 2001, CoventorWare has become a robust, high quality tool. Still, there’s always room for improvement. For CoventorWare 2014, we’ve taken special pains to make the warning and error messages from the MemMech and CoSolveEM solvers more accessible and more useful.

With so many inputs and so many possible uses, good documentation is also critical. CoventorWare has long had context-sensitive help links throughout the software that take users directly to the pertinent reference material, a global search function via the Advanced Search capability in Adobe Reader, and MEMS-specific tutorials. For CoventorWare 2014, considerable effort has gone into refining and extending the documentation content. The reference material for the field solvers has been thoroughly reviewed or rewritten in the case of the new CoSolveEM solver. And, we’ve rewritten some existing tutorials, notably the gyroscope tutorial, and added a new tutorial on microbolometer analysis. Still, most users would rather go to the dentist than read software documentation, turning to it only when they have a problem. With all the improvements to the CoventorWare documentation, I advise even experienced users to take time to scan the new reference material and work through at least the Basic MEMS Device tutorial and one of the more advanced tutorials that’s relevant to their practice.

Usability, robustness, quality and documentation may not be glamorous topics, but I expect that long-time CoventorWare users will really notice and appreciate the improvements while new users will simply enjoy the benefits of many years of experience. Happy MEMS designing with CoventorWare!

Share
Coventor
Coventor

Related posts

Figure 1 displays a single cell of a conventional DRAM that consists of 2 Word Lines (WLs), a Bit Line (BL) and 2 Storage Node Contacts (SNC) in Figure 1(a). There are 3 images in the figure. The Saddle Fin is produced during the WL etch step (prior to WL metal deposition) and is located below the cell wordline (Figure 1(b), right center inside a yellow dotted circle). The Saddle Fin structure can be seen in detail by making a vertical cut in the wordline direction (Fig.1(b), right). During device simulation, the Saddle Fin performance can be measured by virtually cropping a transistor and adding ports at the Gate, Source and Drain after an SNC Process (Fig.1(c), showing the gate, source and drain).
May 30, 2023

Improving DRAM Device Performance Through Saddle Fin Process Optimization


Read more - Improving DRAM Device Performance Through Saddle Fin Process Optimization
Figure 6 (left to right): Different profiles using pattern dependence for the antenna and sharp head shapes. a) Antenna shape with POR flow (b) Antenna profile with a gate CD of 26nm (c) Sharp head profile with a gate CD of 28nm (d) Sharp head profile with an etch.

Figure 6 (left to right): Different profiles using pattern dependence for the antenna and sharp head shapes. a) Antenna shape with POR flow (b) Antenna profile with a gate CD of 26nm (c) Sharp head profile with a gate CD of 28nm (d) Sharp head profile with an etch.

April 13, 2023

The Impact of Metal Gate Recess Profile on Transistor Resistance and Capacitance


Read more - The Impact of Metal Gate Recess Profile on Transistor Resistance and Capacitance
Figure 1a (left) displays the process of performing Physical Vapor Deposition (PVD), including Cu bombardment and filling of voids. Figure 1b (right) displays the process of performing Ion Beam Etch (IBE), including ion beam bombardment, mask shadowing and etch regions.

Fig 1a Physical Vapor Deposition (PVD); Fig 1b Ion Beam Etch (IBE)

March 22, 2023

A Deposition and Etch Technique to Lower Resistance of Semiconductor Metal Lines


Read more - A Deposition and Etch Technique to Lower Resistance of Semiconductor Metal Lines
Left to right: SEMulator3D virtual structures of NON, Low K and Airgap spacers for a DRAM cell, with highlighted SiO2, Polysilicon, Silicon, Si3N4, TIN and W layers

Fig. 1: (a) NON, (b) Low k and (c) Airgap spacer

February 28, 2023

A Comparative Evaluation of DRAM bit-line spacer integration schemes


Read more - A Comparative Evaluation of DRAM bit-line spacer integration schemes

Comments are closed.

Product Information

  • Product Offerings
  • Technical Support & Training
  • Licensing
  • System Requirements

Resources

  • Blog
  • Case Studies
  • Videos
  • 2018 MEMS Design Contest

Company

  • About
  • Press
  • Partners & Programs
  • Contact
© Copyright Coventor Inc., A Lam Research Company, All Rights Reserved
Privacy Policy • Terms of Use
Contact Us
  • LOG IN
  • REGISTER