SWAMP - Software and Analysis of Advanced Material Processing Center

 

The SWAMP (Software and Analysis of Advanced Materials Processing Center) in the College of Engineering at the University of Florida features interdisciplinary activities aimed at understanding, optimizing, and developing new techniques for the manufacture and design of integrated circuit devices. The center is devoted to understanding and modeling fundamental properties of the materials and devices involved in micro- and nano-electronics. Both experimental and theoretical research is vital to this vision. The SWAMP center performs systematic, fundamental experiments designed to verify models of the physics and chemistry of the materials, structures, and processes. The models developed are licensed to industry to provide technology transfer of the center's research results. Through experimentation, the center develops a better understanding of the changes, on the atomic scale, that occur in the materials used in microelectronics when they are processed. The center uses this understanding to develop physically based models that can be inserted into process and device simulators that allow one to perform accurate virtual investigations of advanced micro- and nano-electronics.

This center features interdisciplinary activities combining analytic techniques from materials science to modeling and device design. This interdisciplinary approach has proved valuable to industry since it has provided software that models the physics and chemistry of the manufacturing process, and experimental work that aims at calibrating the software models. One of the acknowledged strengths of the program is that the students learn techniques and capabilities interdisciplinary teams.

One of the Center's strengths has been technology transfer to industry. Software has been developed (Florida Object Oriented Process Simulator, FLOOPS), which has been distributed around the world and has been commercialized by ISE. The software project has received the SRC Technical Excellence Award.