The power of using automatic device optimization, based on iterative device simulations, in design of high-performance devices

Device design is a time consuming work, where the influence of many design parameters has to be investigated carefully. In advanced devices optimal performance is often achieved taking multiple trade-off into consideration, and manual device optimization is often insufficient. In this paper we present the feasibility of using device optimization for design on electronic devices. An optimization tool is developed, which runs device simulations and automatically changes the design parameters, searching for optimal performance according to a specified performance measure. This has been shown to be a very time and cost efficient way for device design, as the search for optimal performance is fully automatic working in a systematic way 24 hours 7 days a week. From an industrial point of view this is very important as it can reduce the evaluation and optimization cost for new devices considerably. It is impossible to give a fair comparison between different devices unless these are designed to give optimal performance. We give a demonstration of the usefulness of this method in a comparison between different device topologies which individually have been optimized for best performance.