IEEE Launches TCAD, an Electronic-Only Journal

Posted on June 18, 1997

One of the world's first electronic-only engineering journals is now offered by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). The IEEE Journal of Technology Computer-Aided Design (TCAD) can be reached through the IEEE Home Page at http://www.ieee.org/journal/tcad.

Since the journal was launched recently, 11 engineering papers have been received and to date, three have been accepted and are available on the journal web page. The papers are reviewed by a Board of Publications headed by the journal's editor-in-chief, Mark Law, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Florida. "We believe this is among the first electronic engineering journals with no hard-copy backup," he said.

The new journal plans to offer subjects of interest to a wide audience of readers, including the scientific, engineering and related technical community. "We really want to get topics covering the entire spectrum of TCAD, which is a reasonably broad subfield, involved in the journal," said Law. "We're looking for papers that are very numerical and theoretical, all the way up to the experimental verification of models."

In particular, the Board of Publications will welcome papers that make special use of the medium to create dynamic visual displays. "For example, a paper showing electronically the movement of an oxide as it grows during the processing of an integrated circuit wafer couldn't be published any other way," Law said.

The web page and software for the electronic journal were developed by a research team led by Paul Losleben, a senior research scientist at Stanford University. The journal was developed as part of a "technical repository, a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency-sponsored project which is looking at ways to use modern computer technology to enhance interaction among researchers who are geographically separated," Losleben said.

The technical repository offers four key advantages, according to Losleben: "It creates new ways for communicating ideas; it offers more rapid publication than paper journals; more material can be accommodated since there are no page limitations; and it is more economic than paper materials because specific ideas can be targeted directly to those readers who are most interested in them."

To encourage the submission of papers and/or abstracts for the electronic journal, author guidelines can easily be located on the IEEE Home Page. Complete papers will appear in the electronic journal as soon as they are accepted, and will remain on line as long as disk space is available. If growing popularity of the journal creates a shortage of disk space, the older articles will be placed on a CD ROM, Law explained. The electronic journal includes citation (author/title/abstract/reference) entries for available papers, in HTML format; and complete papers in PDF (AcrobatR) format.

The first wave of articles submitted for the journal included several papers from a 1996 conference on the Simulation of Semiconductor Processes and Devices. "We will create a subdirectory of those papers, and there may be other special issues for proceedings of other conferences and similar events, as we go along," said Law.

He is currently looking for four additional editors for the journal, to cover the Eastern and Western U.S., Europe and Japan. "Once these editors are established, papers for consideration can be submitted directly to them," Law said.