A highly efficient adaptive mesh approach to semiconductor device simulation-application to impact ionization analysis

In the simulation of semiconductor devices, it is desirable to obtain accurate results at low calculation costs. Both conditions are, however, difficult to satisfy simultaneously since high accuracy always calls for a high computation cost. This is mainly due to the need for a large mesh number for the numerical solution of governing equations. Since the adaptive mesh method is known to be effective in dealing with a tradeoff problem of this kind, the authors propose an efficient adaptive mesh-generation algorithm based on an evaluation of impact ionization discretization errors. It is found that the approach reduces computation cost at no expense in accuracy.