In a TCAD environment, it would be convenient to represent devices to be simulated as objects belonging to a device class hierarchy and with methods attached to them. Thus a device would ``know'' how to simulate itself, i.e. its class would have methods attached which invoke the appropriate simulator. To achieve this, the design representation of the data level has to be fully object-oriented, and the procedural interface has to provide means to build class hierarchies and attach methods to classes.
In contrast to the object representation provided by PIF or GRS, full object-orientedness also encompasses the definition of high-level objects like complete devices, wafer subdomains or even small circuits and the corresponding methods used by applications to manipulate those objects. While even a high-level TCAD application (like, e.g., a task-level program) now has to deal with low-level objects, this should not be necessary, and raising the abstraction level by providing a fully object-oriented view of the design problem under consideration definitely adds flexibility and user-friendliness to the framework and makes it easier and more convenient for the engineer to define and execute design tasks on the task level.
A basic cornerstone has been laid already with the creation of VOOPS and its application in the GRS high-level library. However, its object-oriented approach to grid and attribute representation has to be extended further to whole geometries and to what in the PIF syntax is called a snapshot, so that an application using this interface has a full high-level view of the simulation problem under consideration.