Transient simulation of silicon devices and circuits

Abstract

In this paper, we present an overview of the physical principles and numerical methods used to solve the coupled system of non-linear partial differential equations that model the transient behavior of silicon VLSI device structures. We also describe how the same techniques are applicable to circuit simulation. A composite linear multistep formula is introduced as the time-integration scheme. Newton-iterative methods are exploited to solve the nonlinear equations that arise at each time step. We also present a simple data structure for nonsymmetric matrices with symmetric nonzero structures that facilitates iterative or direct methods with substantial efficiency gains over other storage schemes. Several computational examples, including a CMOS latchup problem, are presented and discussed.