Creating a curriculum for an integrated circuit device at a senior high school

Abstract

LSI systems are used at all places in modern society. A number of different technologies are used to produce LSI systems, therefore it becomes difficult to understand these systems. The education which was consistent from an integrated circuit (IC) design to a printed circuit board mounting was mainly attained at universities and graduate schools. In this study, the training for understanding IC stacked structure and layout design was conducted on the education of a senior high school. Exclusive CAD software for LSI design, α-SX was used to IC layout design. Each Student had designed an inverter and a NAND circuit. They had designed a full adder circuit in a group. Then with public development equipment, IC chips were actually manufactured along with this layout design. Bare chips were observed with scanning electron microscope (SEM). SEM and Energy Dispersive x-ray Spectroscopy (EDX) analysis were effective to deeply understand between stacked structures and material characteristics of an IC. This project was taken as a cooperation education of a high school and a university. We showed the possibility to take in an integrated circuit structure education to one of the training subjects in a senior high school. © 2012 The Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan.