Numerical comparison of three stochastic methods for nonlinear PN junction problems

Abstract

We apply the Monte Carlo, stochastic Galerkin, and stochastic collocation methods to solving the drift-diffusion equations coupled with the Poisson equation arising in semiconductor devices with random rough surfaces. Instead of dividing the rough surface into slices, we use stochastic mapping to transform the original deterministic equations in a random domain into stochastic equations in the corresponding deterministic domain. A finite element discretization with the help of AFEPack is applied to the physical space, and the equations obtained are solved by the approximate Newton iterative method. Comparison of the three stochastic methods through numerical experiment on different PN junctions are given. The numerical results show that, for such a complicated nonlinear problem, the stochastic Galerkin method has no obvious advantages on efficiency except accuracy over the other two methods, and the stochastic collocation method combines the accuracy of the stochastic Galerkin method and the easy implementation of the Monte Carlo method.