The need for continuous extensions and for a concept for tool integration into a common framework has been widely recognized ([14] [19]), but hardly been addressed in existing TCAD systems.
Despite the considerable number of very powerful and flexible integrated TCAD systems in industrial use, just a few of them exhibit a framework-like architecture (e.g. [34] [9] [14] [24]), most of them hardly contain tool integration support and entirely lack support for tool development.