Study of parallel numerical methods for semiconductor device simulation

Simulators of semiconductor devices have to solve systems of equations generated by the discretization of partial differential equations, which are the most time-consuming part of the simulation process. Therefore, the use of an effective method to solve these linear systems is essential. In this work we have evaluated the efficiency of different parallel direct and iterative solvers used for the solution of the drift–diffusion equations in semiconductor device simulation. Several preconditioning techniques have been applied in order to minimize the execution times. We have found that FGMRES and BCGSTAB solvers preconditioned with Additive Schwarz are the most suitable for these types of problems. The results were obtained in an HP Superdome cluster with 128 Itanium2 1.5 GHz. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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