Background Information and Instructions
This web site is the Internet Laboratory for Semiconductor Device Measurements. This laboratory is used in conjunction with the courses on semiconductor devices and circuits. These courses might be offered to remote students on a global scale allowing them to obtain hands-on experience in semiconductor device characterization. This removes a major obstacle for establishing a boundless and complete remote engineering education curriculum. As an added benefit, the Internet lab technology offers the students the opportunity to work with sophisticated equipment, of the kind they are more likely to find in an industrial setting, and which may be too expensive for most schools to purchase and maintain.
The first time when
you try to run an experiment, you must open the client window and connect to
the server. In order to open the client window, click the button "Open
client window". (This button is at the bottom of every experiment page,
you can't miss it!)
Upon opening of the client window, the
instructions are displayed in the text field. Activate the menu item
"Connect" in the pop-up menu "Operation" to make a
connection. After a little while, if the connection is established, you should
see the greeting message from the server displaying in the text field, and the
instructions are removed. If you want to see the instructions now or at any
time later, you may activate the menu item "Show instructions" in the
"Help" menu and a dialog window will pop-up displaying the
instructions. You may click the button "Hide instructions" to close
it. The opening of the client window as well as the connection to the server
need to be done just once for each session.
To start the experiment, activate the menu item "Start Experiment" in the pop-up menu "Operation" and the Channel Setup Dialog will pop up. If the check box item for the corresponding experiment is grayed, this experiment is not presently available. (We might activate it later.) Otherwise, you may select the experiment by clicking on it, and clicking the "OK" button.
On the Source Setup pop-up panel, select the experiment parameters. You can also use the default settings. When the setting is finished, you may click the button "Send experiment to server", which will send the commands generated according to your settings to the HPIB server. If the parameters you set will cause the measurement exceed the safety voltage limit, or any other trivial mistakes happens, a warning message will appear in the Message text field. Then you have to correct the experiment settings. You may cancel the experiment at any time before it is sent.
The server is designed to handle multi-user and multi-task situations. A new experiment can be started at any time (also before the previous experiments are finished) by again activating the menu item "Start experiment" in the "Operation" menu. The server controls the instrument HP4142B Modular DC Source/Monitors, and performs the experiments in the order of receipt. Upon the receipt of an experiment, the server informs the client about the number of the previously received experiments to be done. After the experiment is finished, the measurement results are sent back to your page (through the client window). On the client page, the experimental data are displayed in a format compatible with the AIM-Spice processor, and are plotted. (This is why the numbers of columns and rows are displayed.) The client page uses one single display area for all the experimental data, and the plot area behaves like a multi-page display. The user can go to any "page" to view the plot of the experiment on that page by clicking on the "next page" and "previous page" buttons. When all the experiments are finished, go to the menu item "Quit" in the "Operation" menu, and hence both the connection and the client window are closed.
The data in the text field can be saved using "copy and paste" functions of windows and Unix systems. To save the plotted graph, you can use screen hard copy methods, such as pressing "Alt-Print Screen" on a PC keyboard and then paste as usual in any document.