An interactive program for determining junction depths in diffused silicon devices

An interactive program, based on the classical theory of Irvin, has been developed for predicting the junction depth in diffused p-n junctions in silicon. Students are able to vary the input parameters (surface concentration, sheet resistivity, and background concentration) of the problem and junction depth versus various processing parameters is displayed. Supporting information, such as the concentration versus depth profiles of the dopant and the concentration dependence of the dopant mobility, are also available. Our program is based on technology developed for a much broader class of interactive problems similar to the one described here. The underlying computational package is written in Java. The graphical user interface used is dynamically constructed by parsing a file containing a specified set of XML tags we call XPDL (extensible problem descriptor language), thus making it easy for those with experience writing web pages in HTML to make the transition into modifying the present application or to writing new applications.