Productivity increase in process and device simulation throughput for integrated circuit manufacturing companies

This paper describes methodologies to improve process and device simulation throughput for integrated circuit manufacturing companies. Presently available hardware, process and device simulation software, and their usage in a typical semiconductor company were considered as reference to estimate the improvement in computational efficiency and the associated cost. In a company of N active users, the estimated improvement in computational efficiency with respect to the present performance is shown to be more than N and 5N times in an uninterrupted and a distributed computing environment respectively.