Advanced numerical methods and software approaches for semiconductor device simulation

In this article the authors concisely present several modern strategies that are applicable to drift-dominated carrier transport in higher-order deterministic models such as the drift-diffusion, hydrodynamic, and quantum hydrodynamic systems. The approaches include extensions of upwind and artificial dissipation schemes, generalization of the traditional Scharfetter-Gummel approach, Petrov-Galerkin and streamline-upwind Petrov Galerkin (SUPG), entropy variables, transformations, least-squares mixed methods and other stabilized Galerkin schemes such as Galerkin least squares and discontinuous Galerkin schemes. The treatment is representative rather than an exhaustive review and several schemes are mentioned only briefly with appropriate reference to the literature. Some of the methods have been applied to the semiconductor device problem while others are still in the early stages of development for this class of applications. They have included numerical examples from the recent research tests with some of the methods. A second aspect of the work deals with algorithms that employ unstructured grids in conjunction with adaptive refinement strategies. The full benefits of such approaches have not yet been developed in this application area and they emphasize the need for further work on analysis, data structures and software to support adaptivity. Finally, they briefly consider some aspects of software frameworks. These include dial-an-operator approaches such as that used in the industrial simulator PROPHET, and object-oriented software support such as those in the SANDIA National Laboratory framework SIERRA