Energy conserving, self-force free Monte Carlo simulations of semiconductor devices on unstructured meshes

Tue, 17 Feb 2015 16:31:32 GMT

M. Aldegunde and K. Kalna, "Energy conserving, self-force free Monte Carlo simulations of semiconductor devices on unstructured meshes", Comput. Phys. Commun. 189, pp. 31-36 (2015), doi:10.1016/j.cpc.2014.11.020

Unphysical self-forces resulting from the particle–mesh coupling occur when ensemble Monte Carlo simulations of semiconductor devices use an unstructured mesh to describe device geometry. We report on the development of a correction to the driving electric field on arbitrary meshes and show that self-forces can be virtually eliminated on a finite element mesh at a small additional computational cost. The developed methodology is included into a self-consistent 3D finite element Monte Carlo device simulator. We show the efficiency of the method simulating an isolated particle and obtaining kinetic energy conservation down to a magnitude of 10⁻¹⁰ $^{}$ meV. The methodology is later applied to a FinFET simulation to show what impact can be expected from the self-forces using traditional electric field interpolation strategies. We find that for a large enough ensemble of particles, the impact of self-forces on the final I_D–V_G is almost negligible.

Predictive Modelling » Publications (tag [maldegunde])

Energy conserving, self-force free Monte Carlo simulations of semiconductor devices on unstructured meshes