Computation of field and charge transport in compound semiconductor devices-some new features and methods

Features of compound semiconductor devices are examined from the numerical analysis point of view. Three computational methods are presented to meet the increased complexity and difficulties in simulating device characteristics including field and charge distributions. These methods are: a finite element discretization approach to improve the accuracy of discretization and convergence, a self-adaptive mesh refinement technique to obtain an optimum mesh, and a preconditioning iteration method to solve the linear and nonlinear equations more efficiently. These methods have been incorporated into a two-dimensional general-purpose semiconductor device analyzer (GPSDA) and have been tested in simulations of various device structures. The results indicate that these methods are superior to the conventional methods for solving semiconductor equations in terms of both storage and CPU time requirements.