Dragan Manic

• PhD
• Deputy Division Head at Centre Suisse d'Electronique et de Microtechnique

Chips are everywhere. Silicon content is ever increasing. Many applications get a real added value with a dedicated, optimized integrated circuit. A lot of opportunities are around. The fabless semiconductor model is “democratic”. Foundries are accessible. So, take your chance, be innovative, master your design cost and succeed with your own silico...

A System-on-Chip (SoC) offers an optimal implementation of electronics for portable medical systems and in particular for Body Area Network (BAN) applications. It integrates as much functionality as possible into a single chip thereby allowing miniaturization of the system, while optimizing performance and power consumption. Using today's mature an...

A dedicated system-on-chip (SoC) integrates as much functionality as possible in a single chip and thereby allows miniaturisation of portable medical systems, while optimising performance and power consumption. Today's feature-rich semiconductor process technology platforms Smean that SoC based solutions also optimise the cost and reliability of th...

Integrated Hall magnetic sensors are used in automotive and computer industry. Their farther penetration into other applications is mainly hampered by the problems of switching noise and of offset and drift related to the packaging stress. The equivalent magnetic noise and offset can be dramatically reduced by integrating magnetic flux concentrator...

A method for encapsulation stress drift measurement based on the piezo-Hall effect is proposed. Accuracy of ±0.25 MPa for the sum of in-plane normal stresses is achieved. Using this method, the drift of die stress in IC plastic packages has been measured after temperature cycling. Stress relaxation with the time constant of about one day has been o...

Mechanical stress related instabilities in silicon bulk material under integrated circuit (IC) metallization are investigated. The test structures based on Wheatstone bridge configuration in which two out of four resistors were covered by wide aluminium stripes were fabricated especially for this purpose. Calculations based on the piezoresistance e...

A quasipersistent change in the magnetic sensitivity of nonplate-like Hall sensors after light exposure has been discovered. The recovery time constant is about 10 min. The observed effect is very similar to the persistent photoconductivity (PPC) which has been described some time ago in silicon bulk material. Surprisingly, the new effect is about...

The temperature coefficient of the current-related sensitivity of a Hall plate in submicron CMOS technology was measured. A zero-temperature-coefficient region was observed. A model of the temperature coefficient based on the freeze-out effect and the temperature dependence of the Hall scattering factor was developed. Using a Hall sensor in the obs...

A fully integrated sensor microsystem for blue/ultraviolet (UV) radiation detection is presented. The photosensitive part includes a 1-mm2 blue/UV-selective stripe-shaped photodiode, which has maximal response in the short-wavelength range. A 15-times smaller infrared (IR) photodiode is added to compensate the parasitic photocurrent generated by th...

A fully integrated sensor microsystem for blue/ultraviolet radiation detection is presented. The photosensitive part combines a blue/UV selective stripe-shaped photodiode with a small compensation infrared photodiode. A transimpedance amplifier with 1 GΩ feedback resistor is integrated on the same silicon chip. The main features of the op map are a...

A novel method is presented to render ultraviolet (UV) flame detectors insensitive to ignition spark radiation. The method involves isolating the signal due to the sparks from the UV sensor output and subtracting a DC signal proportional to it from the output of the flame detector sensor system. A practical demonstration of the method is given usin...

Thermal-mechanical stresses occur in plastic IC packages. These stresses affect Hall plate magnetic sensitivity via the piezo-Hall effect. In this paper the short and long-term stability problems of Hall plates encapsulated in SOP and TSSOP packages are considered. A sensitivity shift is observed when reflow soldering, temperature cycling, or humid...

Thesis (doctoral), Ecole Polytechnique Federale, Lausanne, 2000.

First Page of the Article

A new on-wafer heating test structure is proposed for wafer level stability testing. The test structure is based on Wheatstone bridge configuration. Two out of four resistors are covered by aluminum. An optimization of the on-wafer heating technique is presented. The new structure and the structure consisting of two out of four resistors with the l...

A new microsystem for very high-accuracy magnetic measurement of all three field components is presented. A single silicon die incorporating eight sensor devices is mounted on a support and then cut. This galvanic separation is essential, since the applied technology of vertical Hall devices yields very high-quality devices, but does not provide fo...

In this paper we present a new test structure, consisting of an array of piezoresistors, for analyzing the influence of the packaging procedure on the stability of silicon IC device parameters. The test structure has been mounted onto the Printed Circuit Board (PCB) substrate. Bending of the substrate with the mounted chip has been performed. The r...

Many semiconductor devices rely on the so called “denuded zone” of the silicon wafers. It is therefore essential to have simple means to monitor the purity of this zone. It will be shown that persistent photoconductivity (PPC) can be related to the oxygen concentration in the wafer, and thus can be used to evaluate the quality of the denuded zone....

We have developed a new on-wafer test structure to monitor the effect of stress on the electrical properties of semiconductor devices. We have fabricated this structure on two wafers with different oxygen concentrations. We show that we can directly relate the effect of thermally-induced stress to the oxygen concentration in the wafer by means of s...