SIMULATION OF ADVANCED SEMICONDUCTOR-DEVICES USING SUPERCOMPUTERS

The current generation of advanced semiconductor devices often exhibit nonlinear effects which require numerical approaches to their simulation. In addition to nonlinearities, the accurate description of the behavior of ever increasingly small devices, as well as those which contain heterostructures or superlattices, demands extraordinarily complex techniques which typically overwhelm most computational environments. Under these conditions, the supercomputer provides the only reasonable means by which the behavior of advanced semiconductor devices can be examined in detail. In this paper, we present a discussion of computational techniques and their application to modeling avalanching semiconductor devices within a supercomputer environment. Specifically, issues such as velocity and current estimators, bipolar simulation, temporal response, and subensemble simulation will be addressed. Calculated results are presented for representative systems to illustrate the use of these estimators.