Discretisation techniques for the physical simulation of power semiconductor devices

It is shown that in the numerical simulation of power devices, the chosen method of spatial discretisation affects the expected solution error for a given mesh density. Adaptive transient simulation benefits from a formulation which provides a combined spatial and temporal description of the simulated variables. A new space-time finite element formulation of the semiconductor device equations is presented which permits a fully consistent description of all simulated variables over the space-time domain. Results from simulations using adaptive space and time discretisations demonstrate that reliable simulation results can be achieved without significant operator intervention