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WHITE
PA P E R
A Local Area Network Laboratory Based on the
Keithley 4200-SCS for Engineering Education
in Microelectronics
Avraham Chelly, Ph.D.
Introduction
The microelectronics laboratory has been an integral part of the modern
curriculum in engineering education for years so that undergraduate students
can apply what they've learned of their device physics and VLSI courses.
In this way, they can perform measurements on "home-made" devices and/
or advanced devices imported from the industry in the framework of an
end-year project. The continuous progress in microelectronics technology
has largely replaced the classic curve-tracer with a modern PC-controllable
parameter analyzer, allowing students to make more precise and convenient
measurements.
However, due to the relative high cost of this type of equipment, equipping
a teaching lab with many such measurement units may be unaffordable. As
a result, during the last decade, the concept of a remote laboratory through
the Internet has been pioneered at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute [1, 2]
(AIM-Lab) in collaboration with the Norwegian University of Science and
Technology [3] (Lab-On-Web) and developed at MIT [1, 4] (Web Lab) to
allow a large numbers of users to share a single piece of advanced equipment
from their home or any other location in the world. The limits of this approach
are, of course, due to the elimination of the "hands-on" experiments in a lab
environment: lack of flexibility (changing the device, changing the instruments,
degree of programming flexibility, etc.), but also lack of immediate feedback
from the system itself (precision of the manual probe setup, observation of
instruments and devices, human environment, etc.), and, last but not least,
Keithley Instruments, Inc.
28775 Aurora Road
Cleveland, Ohio 44139
(440) 248-0400
Fax: (440) 248-6168
www.keithley.com
A G r e A t e r M e A s u r e o f C o n f i d e n C e
the lack of good laboratory practices (note-taking, discipline, troubleshooting, personal
initiative, and instructor guidance, etc.).
The concept presented here offers a compromise solution. It allows students in the lab
framework to measure several devices mounted on separate probe stations respectively. These
stations are connected to a state-of-art Keithley Instruments Semiconductor Characterization
System (4200-SCS) and other instruments (C-V meters, pulse generators, etc.) through a
switch matrix. A PC located beside each station allows students to access the 4200-SCS
remotely for measurements through the Local Area Network (LAN). The concept, named
Lab-e-LAN, was originally designed, set up, and successfully run at Bar-Ilan University's
School of Engineering (Israel) for the last two academic years; it was also imported to the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem's School of Engineering (Israel) in 2006.
Lab-e-LAN purposes and architecture
The Advanced Device Characterization Lab is intended for the fourth-year undergraduate
students in the microelectronics track. Twelve three-hour lab sessions are scheduled over the
second semester. The lab present capacity is three pairs of students at a time and is expandable
to six pairs or more. In addition to its use as a teaching lab, the lab allows students to pursue
advanced end-year projects in microelectronics (described below) and also will serve some
research projects in prototype device testing and reliability studies (in development).
The Lab-e-LAN lab architecture is summarized in Figure 1. The Keithley 4200-SCS is the
core of the lab and was specially selected to fit into the LAN concept thanks to its embedded
industrial PC (Pentium 4) and the powerful Keithley Interactive Test Environment (KITE)
software, which runs under the Windows XP environment. An incremental point was that
Keithley released a "PC or off-line version" of KITE, which allows the user to define the test
and analyze the data from his or her own PC without actually being connected to the 4200-
SCS. A LAN connection is then established from the user's PC using the Windows Remote
Desktop software, for example. In this way, each user is typically connected to the 4200-SCS
for less than one minute, which is all the time needed for file opening, data acquisition, and
saving the results (see the lab protocol described later). Connections between the 4200-SCS
and the other rack-mounted instruments to the switch matrix are made through triax cables
(using the guard potential method [5]).
A G r e A t e r M e A s u r e o f C o n f i d e n C e
LAN Keithley LAN
4200-SCS
+ KITE
TRX IEEE-488
Instrument
Rack
TRX IEEE-488
Switching
TRX Matrix TRX
Probe ... Probe
Station #1 Station #N
PC #1 ... PC #N
+ KITE + KITE
Figure 1: The LAB-e-LAN architectural concept and connections type (TRX=triax cable)
Lab-e-LAN Equipment
In the present configuration in Bar-Ilan University's lab, three pairs of students can work in
a same lab session, sharing two different probe stations and one test fixture respectively. The
following instruments can be used on each probe station through the switch matrix:
1. Measurement instruments (rack-mounted)