Efficient deterministic parallel simulation of 2D semiconductor devices based on WENO-Boltzmann schemes

A flexible parallel deterministic solver of the Boltzmann–Poisson system for 2D semiconductor device simulation on computer clusters is presented. The simulator is obtained by parallelizing a previously proposed numerical scheme based on high order finite difference weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) schemes. Although the underlying numerical scheme presents important advantages over direct simulation Monte Carlo methods, this scheme imposes very high demands of computing power. Due to this, the parallelization of the different calculation phases in the numerical scheme has been tackled. The data subdomain which demands most of the computational workload has been suitably distributed among the processors and several parallel design decisions has been taken in order to achieve good performance. Moreover, the resultant parallel application can be easily adjusted to simulate a wide range of devices and could be easily used by engineers without mathematical background about the underlying numerical scheme. The parallel algorithm has been implemented in C++ augmented with calls to MPI functions and functions of optimized linear algebra libraries. Several experiments have been performed by simulating particular MOSFET and DG-MOSFET devices on a SMP cluster in order to show its efficiency.