FIESTA-HD: A parallel finite element program for hydrodynamic device simulation

Publisher Summary This chapter reviews the convective hydrodynamic transport model (HD) for semiconductor device simulation by employing parallel and stabilized finite element methods. The HD model is shown to resemble the compressible Euler and Navier-Stokes equations and Galerkin/least-squares finite element methods, originally developed for compuational fluid dynamics (CFD) equations. The complexity of the HD model demands enormous computational time. The chapter presents the development of a finite element formulation for the HD transport model. A parallel finite element device simulation program, FIESTA-HD, has been developed and run on distributed memory parallel computers including Intel's i860, Touchstone Delta and the IBM's SP-1 systems. A SPMD programming model is used in the parallel implementation of the device simulator, FIESTA-HD. The chapter demonstrates the portability of FIESTA-HD on distributed memory parallel computers. It presents the numerical results and demonstrates the robustness and accuracy of the numerical schemes. Taking advantage of the advances in parallel computers with stable numerical schemes, simulations are performed with more complex and realistic device models.