Iterative methods in semiconductor device simulation

Abstract

This paper examines iterative methods for solving the semiconductor device equations. The emphasis is on fully coupled methods, because of the failure of decoupled methods for on-state devices. Using the PISCES-II device simulator as a vehicle, incomplete factorization and operator decomposition iterative methods are presented for solving the Newton equations. The dependencies of these methods on factors such as choice of variables, bias condition and initial guess are analyzed. The results are compared with sparse Gaussian elimination.