TCAD-Informed Surrogate Models of Semiconductor Devices

Extensive research has been conducted over the last half-century to develop models of semiconductor devices for use in circuit analysis and simulation. Such models typically fall into one of two categories: “Cheap” analytical models that can be solved quickly but introduce significant error, and “expensive” physics-based models that achieve high accuracy at the price of prohibitive computation time. As electronic circuits grow to contain billions of active devices, there is a pressing need for new models that are both accurate and fast to compute. In this thesis, we introduce Semiconductors.jl, a new semiconductor simulation tool written in the Julia programming language. We use Semiconductors.jl to implement performant surrogate models that approximate the behavior of fine-grained technology computer-aided design (TCAD) device models using a coarsified grid. The resulting surrogate models are shown to approximate the current-voltage characteristics of the fine-grained models to within a maximum error of 0.1% while using less than one tenth as many discretization nodes as the fine-grained baseline model.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2022

Author dc:creator

• Chinnery, Samuel B.

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Edelman, Alan
• Rackauckas, Christopher

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
• Copyright MIT

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC-EDU/1.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/144946

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/144946