Placement optimization of flexible TFT circuits with mechanical strain and temperature consideration

Abstract

Mobility is the primary device parameter affecting circuit performance in flexible thin-film transistor (TFT) technologies, and is particularly sensitive to the change of mechanical strain and temperature. However, existing algorithms only consider the impact of mechanical strain in cell placement of flexible TFT circuits. Without taking temperature into consideration, mobility may be dramatically decreased which leads to circuit performance degradation. This article presents the first work to minimize the mobility variation caused by the change of both mechanical strain and temperature. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithms can effectively and efficiently reduce the increasing critical path delay. ACM Reference Format: Lin, J.-L., Wu, P.-H., and Ho, T.-Y. 2014. Placement optimization of flexible TFT circuits with mechanical strain and temperature consideration.

The 2021 flexible and printed electronics roadmap

“…The study in [141] relied on a statistical timing analyzer (STA) to identify bending hotspots, and used the derived information together with TFT bending models [142] to generate a hotspot mapping for guiding circuit layout, followed by the cell placer's simulated annealing process for finding the optimized cell placement to minimize timing degradation under bending. The study in [143] further suggested inclusion of both mechanical strain and temperature drift's impacts on TFT circuit's performance in layout optimization. For bending or other use cases that require mechanical deformation or thermal cycles, FPE/FHE multi-physics models for electrical, mechanical, and thermal interactions must be comprehensive and accurate in order to derive useful information from multi-physics simulation.…”