Characterization of bipolar devices

Transistor simulators, computer programs which calculate device characteristics as determined by materials properties and impurity profiles, can be employed directly in the performance evaluation of circuit designs. To be practical, two-dimensional effects must be included while simulation costs must not be prohibitive. The program TRANSIM (TRANsistor SIMulator), described in this paper, employs a highly efficient algorithm specialized for bipolar transistor simulation, which reduces simulation costs for one-dimensional analysis by an order of magnitude over previously published approaches. Two-dimensional effects are approximated without the complexity of a full two-dimensional analysis.