3.1.2 Limitations of the PIF-Libraries for Three-Dimensional
Device Simulation

The libraries described above have been heavily used in the two-dimensional version of Minimos-NT. Despite of the implementation in Minimos-NT these libraries have some disadvantages which restrict their practical relevance for a multi-dimensional simulator.

Other obstacles found during code analysis concerning the implementation and usage of the libraries of the two-dimensional version of Minimos-NT are:

Thus, the PIF-Libraries which are used by the two-dimensional version of Minimos-NT are not well suited to handle the geometries, grids and attributes for multi-dimensional TCAD tools. Two solutions have been imaginable:

Within this thesis the second approach has been chosen. Therefore, a new quantity server as well as interfaces to read the device and grid descriptions have been developed. This approach allows to connect Minimos-NT to several existing libraries. An example of such a library is the so called Wafer-State-Server which has been developed at the Institute for Microelectronics within the past years. It is a library which can handle complex geometries and attributes distributed on the grid. The geometries may consist of several segments. Two- and three-dimensional structures are supported. Nevertheless, its two-dimensional capabilities are small. It provides several readers and writers for several formats such as HDF5 [110] or DFISE [111].

Robert Klima 2003-02-06