3.5.2 Structure of the Input Deck Database

The Input Deck database (see Fig. 3.8) contains a toolkit which consists of a reader and a writer module for reading and writing the database description files.

To extend the functionality of the description language the application may register an arbitrary number of application specific functions to the function module. Once the input files are read and the database is built up the application can query items in the database, e.g., model parameters, simulation flow descriptions, or user flags. Items can be evaluated or just tested for their existence, or structures can be analyzed. Moreover, the application may modify existing or add new items to write back runtime information into the database. Equations are evaluated by the runtime evaluation module.

Figure 3.8: The Input Deck database structure.

The Input Deck database is controlled by the application via an application interface which is available for the programming languages C, C++, and LISP to support several different TCAD applications[115,116,K2].