TRANSIENT SIMULATION OF SEMICONDUCTOR-DEVICES USING THE MONTE-CARLO METHOD

A technique to extract transient currents from Monte-Carlo (MC) simulation data is described. It is based on the fact that the integrated terminal current obtained from the MC data is a reasonably smooth function of time and can be easily fitted with a polynomial. The transient current is obtained by simply differentiating the polynomial. The technique is an effective way to get around the statistical noise problem that is inherent in the MC method. A MESFET structure is discussed as an example and the transient terminal currents due to a step change in the gate voltage are obtained. The current gain h21 of the MESFET is computed from the transient currents. The technique described here can be trivially extended to other semiconductor devices and it can be a very useful tool in estimating microwave performance, large-signal behavior, switching response in logic circuits etc.