A SCATTERING MATRIX APPROACH TO DEVICE SIMULATION

A new approach for simulating carrier transport in semiconductor devices is proposed and demonstrated. The approach begins by dividing a device into a number of small elements and defining scattering matrices, which relate the fluxes incident upon each element to the emerging fluxes. By cascading the scattering matrices for each element, carrier transport through the entire device is simulated. When the scattering matrices are computed by solving the Boltzmann equation, low-, high- and nonstationary transport effects can be simulated, but the scattering matrix may also be computed from a wave perspective to treat quantum interference effects within a slab. The ability of this new approach to treat sophisticated transport effects in modern devices is demonstrated by simulating high-field transport in bulk silicon and nonstationary transport in a submicron silicon structure. © 1990.