A parallel implementation of an electrothermal simulation for GaAs MESFET devices

This paper describes the implementation of a Gallium Arsenide (GaAs) Metal-Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor (MESFET) device simulation on a relatively low cost transputer-based parallel system. The physical modeling consists of a comprehensive two-dimensional energy transport time-dependent model taking into account thermal heating effects within the device lattice suitable for steady-state and transient analysis. The semiconductor equations are solved by a Gauss-Seidel point iterative method with successive relaxation and discretised using a finite-difference scheme on a nonuniform grid. Algorithms targeted at message passing Multiple-Instructions Multiple Data (MIMD) distributed memory architectures are described. The efficiency and stability of the parallel algorithms are briefly discussed. A performance model which characterizes the simulation in terms of its efficiency and speed-up for any problem size on any number of processors is presented. A parallel speed-up of 14 is feasible on an array of 16 transputers for a typical MESFET simulation