Thirty Years of Monte Carlo Simulations of Electronic Transport in Semiconductors: Their Relevance to Science and Mainstream VLSI Technology

We review briefly some aspects of the history of Monte Carlo simulations of electronic transport in semiconductors. In the early days their heavy computational cost rendered them suitable only to study problems of pure physics, as simpler models provided the answers necessary to design 'electrostatically good' devices. Now that scaling has taken another meaning (i.e., looking for alternative materials, crystal orientations, device geometries, etc.), Monte Carlo simulations may gain popularity once more, since they allow an efficient and reliable evaluation of speculative ideas. We show examples of both aspects of the results of Monte Carlo work.