ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview on High-current model (HICUM) and its associated infrastructure that needs to be in place to deploy the model for production design purposes. This includes: the basic operating principle of HICUM, how the physical effects in advanced transistors are covered, the geometry scaling methods used, the parameter determination methodolog, how a hierarchy of models can be generated in an efficient way, and new research directions. The temperature-dependent description in HICUM is physics-based, with smooth extensions toward very low and very high temperatures for those expressions that otherwise would become numerically unstable. The respective equations are based on TCs of material parameters such as mobility, intrinsic carrier density, and saturation velocity, allowing even reasonably accurate predictions of the transistor temperature behavior without extracting the parameters. Noise simulation is accomplished in HICUM by adding the physical description of noise sources to the dissipative equivalent circuit elements.
