The Utility of Modeling and Simulation in Determining Transport Performance Properties of Semiconductors

By: Bernardo Cockburn, Joseph W. Jerome, and Chi-Wang Shu


The RKDG method has been effectively used in modeling and simulating semiconductor devices, where the underlying models are hydrodynamic in nature. These include classical as well as quantum models. In this paper, we survey and interpret some of these results. For classical transport, we review the simulation of a benchmark MESFET transistor by means of discontinuous Galerkin methods of degree one. For quantum transport, we report the success in simulation of the resonant tunneling diode. The principal features here are negative differential resistance and hysteresis.
This paper appears in Discontinuous Galerkin Methods: Theory, Computation, and Applications (B. Cockburn, G. Karniadakis, and C.-W. Shu, editors), Lecture Notes in Computational Science and Engineering, vol. 11, Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg (2000), pages 147--156. It can be viewed in the following format: