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7. Future Developments

One of the most exciting features of software projects is that there is always room for improvements and additional features. Thus any software release should include at least a small outlook on future development possibilities.

The current release of the Algorithm Library was designed to be portable to all systems supported by the VISTA/VMAKE framework. Since the quality of most of the existing commercial and publicly available C++ compilers in conjunction with the ``newer'' C++ features has to be considered weak at best, these features had to be omitted for the first implementation of the Algorithm Library and the MDL language specification. Since the release of the ANSI C++ standard [1] this situation is slowly improving. Thus the next releases of the Algorithm Library and MDL should be subject to an according redesign:

An Interactive Development Environment (IDE) for MDL extension libraries and MDL input decks will decrease the threshold for users to develop own extensions to their applications.

When we carefully reconsider the development of TCAD environments in the next few years it seems to be apparent that the usage of distributed computing environments and client server architectures will gain increasing importance. Introducing an optional CORBA [32,53] interface layer into the Algorithm Library and providing IDL interfaces for the basic Model Definition Language structures will boost the possibilities of the Algorithm Library in this field, thus transforming the Algorithm Library into an Algorithm Server.

Last but not least the quality of the Algorithm Library can only be measured in terms of acceptance by its users - application engineers, model developers, and the users of the implemented applications. The existing implementations in PROMIS-NT, MINIMOS-NT, Amigos, and the Levenberg-Marquardt Optimizer mlmmin may serve both as proof of concept and templates for further implementations. In particular in the field of process simulations where new models arise continuously, a tighter integration of the concepts of Amigos and PROMIS-NT as well as additional implementations into implantation, etching, and deposition simulations should be considered to further enhance the capabilities of the PROMIS process simulation tools.


next up previous contents
Next: A. A Tiny Algorithm Up: Dissertation Previous: 6.3 Amigos
Robert Mlekus
1999-11-14