The implementation of oxidation process of the VLSI fabrication based on Cellular Automata in a FPGA

Cellular Automata (CA), characterised by its massive parallelism, constitutes a powerful tool for modelling and simulating complex systems. And CA has been applied successfully to very large scale integration (VLSI) fabrication processes. In this work, a solution has been developed, which handles the complicated boundary and initial conditions imposed by the advancement of the Si-SiO₂ and SiO₂-air fronts during oxidation in unbounded as well as in bounded domains. The solution uses a two-dimensional technology computeraided design system based on CA, which was named CA_OX_TCAD. This system is fully automated and is also able to support the hardware implementation of the corresponding CA algorithm. It leads directly to the FPGA implementation of the CA algorithm, which produces as output the corresponding VHDL code. The simulation results are in very good agreement with experimental data found in the literature.