HackerFab IITB: Democratizing Semiconductor Fabrication and OpenTCAD: A FOSS Python Pipeline for Semiconductor Process & Device Simulation

HackerFab:

HackerFab IITB is India’s first open-source, student-run, low-cost semiconductor fabrication lab (fab). We build open-source educational tools (like litho, sputter) to make chips. We extend a global open-source HackerFab community that hacks and tinkers with fabs - HackerFab!

Semiconductors are the cornerstone of modern civilization, quietly powering the entire world, yet, in India, college students seldom get any hands-on exposure to actually building semiconductor chips. HackerFab seeks to fill this gap by building low-cost and open-source fab templates, which can be replicated by students across India. Our component and machining pipelines are tailored for Indian procurement.

The power of open-source has let us cross the moat of the heavily monopolized fab companies like ASML and TSMC. Our active community on Discord suggests tens of improvements daily, and expertise pours in from people across the globe. This tribal knowledge which we crowdsource was not written down previously, and was gatekept by the industry.

Our CAD designs, lithography scripts, control algorithms, and tool GUIs are all open-source on https://docs.hackerfabiitb.org

Our immediate objectives are:

1. Student Accessibility: Make semiconductor fabrication accessible, affordable, and aspirational for students across colleges in India.
2. Workforce Development: Start a direct pipeline of industry ready talent by providing real, hands on fabrication experience
3. Cost Reduction: Lower the cost of fabrication setups from crores to lakhs, indigenizing them for teaching and prototyping rather than for mass production
4. Replicable Template: Serve as a template that inspires and supports other Indian institutes in creating their own HackerFabs and setting up fabrication facilities all over India.

Read more at https://hackerfabiitb.github.io/

Contact us at hackerfabiitb@gmail.com

OpenTCAD:

Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools span three levels - ones at the PCB design level, at the chip design level and at its most physics-heavy, at the transistor level. We have excellent FOSS tools at the PCB design level (KiCAD, tscircuit) and chip design level (OpenROAD, KLayout) but relatively little at the layer underneath : TCAD, the physics-heavy simulations of how transistors with a particular stack are fabricated and how they behave. Almost all of the existing tools are proprietary - Synopsys Sentaurus and Silvaco Atlas dominate, with licenses costing thousands of dollars per bench.

OpenTCAD is an attempt to close that gap. It is a modular Python framework that stitches together best-in-class FOSS components: Gmsh for meshing, ViennaPS for process topography, FiPy for doping diffusion, DEVSIM for drift-diffusion device simulation, into a single unified pipeline: process recipe → meshed structure with doping → device I-V characteristics. This involves bridging different libraries, defining a common mesh data format that carries material, doping and contact information in between different modules.

This talk discusses why TCAD matters, why the existing FOSS pieces have not been glued together before, the architecture choices made while building OpenTCAD, and a live demo simulating a device from a process recipe to an I-V curve.

1. HackerFab IITB and the wider HackerFab movement
2. The tools we have developed
3. Documentation and how to contribute
4. What TCAD is, how it sits below chip-design in the EDA stack at the fab level, and why the FOSS ecosystem has a gap here
5. A tour of the mature FOSS components (Gmsh, ViennaPS, DEVSIM, FiPy) that already exist in isolation
6. How OpenTCAD's MeshField data model carries physics-meaningful values across process/device boundaries
7. A working demo: process recipe in, I-V curve out, all in Python
8. How to contribute: calibration data, device models, and process steps are all areas where the project needs help