EE 105 Formal Laboratory Report Guidelines Experiment 4 Integrated Circuit Resistors See http www writing eng vt edu workbooks laboratory html for some additional help from Virginia Tech s excellent technical writing program Abstract 75 word limit Technical papers have a short abstract for the purpose of describing the essential results so that indexing services e g INSPEC for electrical engineering related fields can search for key terms to classify the paper The abstract should be written last and contain a concise description of the topic and your key experimental results Engineers agonize over every word in an abstract in order to maximize its information content while not bending the rules of English grammar to the point of unintelligibility Introduction This section primarily tells the reader enough background information to understand i the technical essentials and ii the goal of the measurements The cross sections of the Microlinear process are examples of important background material Copying or paraphrasing the relevant sections of the lab manual is not adequate You should include references to the textbook and other material that you find helpful in providing the background information Use the IEEE format in http standards ieee org guides style section7 html for citing your references which you should collect at the end of your report Procedure This part should summarize the experimental procedures you followed as well discuss important issues with the experimental methods and measurement techniques In this section you should be very careful in describing details that could be important for someone trying to reproduce your experiment Your laboratory notes will provide the raw material for this section so be sure to be very thorough in recording your results Why should you bother with this level of detail Because the reproduction of experimental results is the foundation of both engineering and science Over my career there have been many times when companies and other academic groups have contacted me to confirm details of the procedure section in one of my group s papers and to discuss reasons why their experiments yielded different measurements In one case we looked in the records to find the relative humidity in the Berkeley Microlab and in another case the graduate student visited a research group at a national lab to reproduce his experiments on their equipment We have also used other groups results in our experiments An EE graduate student in BSAC has spent many months over the past year trying to extract a protein from a biological sample using a procedure published by a biosciences group in Germany in 2002 A long conference call last summer revealed that the German scientist had not provided enough detail in his procedure section he looked into his lab book and then remembered some very important and very helpful tips As a final example a former graduate student of mine spent several weeks trying to understand how his own complex gyroscope interface circuit operated when the chips returned from the foundry His sloppy and incomplete design report was impossible for his to decipher only six months later After learning his lesson the hard way he s now a leading analog IC designer In this Experiment the SMU setup on the parameter analyzer including the current compliance settings are examples of important details Results This extremely important section includes all the measurements and plots from your lab notebook The resistance measurements in this lab are used to extract estimates of the contact e g metal silicon interface resistance The precision of your measurement as well as the uncertainty error bars will be very important in evaluating your results You should therefore be careful in estimating the number of significant figures in your data Instrumentation error is a common issue in the technical literature in my experience as an editor of an IEEE journal many authors did more measurements at the request of reviewers since they felt that the paper didn t adequately address issues with the measurements Your results should be well organized with the axes on your graphs clearly labeled and an informative caption added For example a caption stating Effect of Gate Voltage on Drain Current for a MOS Transistor is much better than I vs V Tables are also helpful to summarize measurements For several groups simply plugging in the numbers into the equations in the lab manual will lead to negative resistance values which are physically possible You will need to describe how measurement errors can lead to this outcome in the analysis section Analysis In this section you should comment on whether or not your results matched your expectations and explain the meaning of your plots Your understanding of the instrumentation and how the measurements were made can be very important in this process The manuals for the Agilent instruments on available on the web in case you want to dig into the details of what went on inside the box By the way this lab involves measurements of resistance on what are inherently non linear integrated circuit structures as I ve emphasized throughout the lectures Perhaps you can investigate whether or not there are significant nonlinearities Finally your analysis and interpretation of the results give meaning to what is otherwise raw data You must communicate to the reader exactly what you have done in the data analysis Force fitting data to a preconceived model is a serious violation of the ethical code of our profession since it s a form of dishonesty You may find that there are outliers in your data which you feel you must ignore to make sense of the overall picture If that s the case tell the reader what you re doing and include the outliers in your initial results Discussion and Conclusions The final section involves your interpretation of the experimental results and analysis You should include enough theoretical background for the reader to understand the principles behind the equations The origin and assumptions behind the equations used in analyzing your data should be discussed The textbook and lab manual are not sufficient for this purpose you should look into other references Furthermore you should interpret your results and your level of confidence in them Are they reasonable and consistent with the literature They should be presented in the standard form For example contact resistances are usually normalized to the contact area which
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