Moving mesh adaptation for Si and GaN-based power device simulation

Abstract

In this paper, we describe the development of moving mesh adaptation framework and its application to charge transport simulation of semiconductor devices, with emphasis on its relevance to power semiconductor devices. Mesh adaptivity in the context of semiconductor device simulation is an important problem and can help deal with the convergence and numerical stability issues, as well as automate the meshing process. We demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed meshing scheme through the simulation of a GaN-based power diode, as well as a Si diode with a non-rectangular doping profile, by externally coupling our framework to Sentaurus Device TCAD. We perform error analysis and compare our results with simulations based on high-resolution uniform structured meshes as well as manually refined axis-aligned meshes. In addition to the benefits in terms of accuracy, automation, and generality, our method can be regarded as a stepping stone toward computationally scalable and adaptive semiconductor device simulations.