Computational aspects of the local iterative Monte Carlo technique

Lately, the Local Iterative Monte Carlo technique was introduced for an efficient simulation of effects connected to sparsely populated regions in semiconductor devices like hot electron effects in silicon MOSFETs. This paper focuses on computational aspects of this new Monte Carlo technique, namely the reduction of the computation time by parallel computation and the reuse of drift information. The Local Iterative Monte Carlo technique combines short Monte Carlo particle flight simulations with an iteration process to a complete device simulation. The separation between short Monte Carlo simulations and the iteration process makes a simple parallelization strategy possible. The necessary data transfer is small and can be performed via the Network File System. An almost linear speed up could be achieved. Besides by parallelization, the computational expenses can be significantly reduced, when the results of the short Monte Carlo simulations are memorized in a drift table and used several times. A comparison between a bulk, a one-dimensional and the two-dimensional Local Iterative Monte Carlo simulation reveals that by using the drift information more than once, becomes increasingly efficient with increasing dimension of the simulation.