Simulation of Bipolar High-Voltage Devices in the Neighborhood of Breakdown

Qiming Wu
OmniVision Technologies, Inc.
4320, Stevens Creek Blvd., Suite 275
San Jose, California 95129
U.S.A.
Email: Ming@OVT.Com
François E. Cellier
Institute of Computational Science
ETH Zürich
CH-8092 Zürich
Switzerland
Email: FCellier@Inf.ETHZ.CH

Abstract

This paper investigates numerical techniques for the solution of the system of nonlinear elliptic PDEs that simulates bipolar semiconductor devices under high reverse bias voltage. Bipolar devices are usually modeled as a set of three elliptic PDEs representing the field equation and the electron and hole current continuity equations. However, these equations can be solved effectively in the case of low-voltage devices only, e.g. by use of the BAMBI program. As shown in this paper, it is possible to simplify the model in case of high-voltage devices. A powerful software toolkit, ELLPACK, has been used to solve the resulting two-dimensional Poisson equation. ELLPACK enabled us to easily compare several numerical solution techniques for their efficiency to solve this problem. To analyze the effectiveness of the toolkit as a whole, a comparison was made between ELLPACK and a special-purpose program written by us.

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