The field of MNDS offers highly specialized publicly available simulation tools, of which an
overview is presented in the following in alphabetical order.
Archimedes [5][33] is a two-dimensional Monte Carlo Boltzmann transport based
simulation tool for submicron and nanoscale semiconductor devices. Various physical effects
and transport models can be investigated for electrons and heavy holes with respect to a rich
set of materials. Heterostructures as well as electrostatic and magnetic fields by solving
Poisson’s and Faraday’s equation are supported. The tool is released under the general
public license ( GPL) and coded in the C programming language. Additionally, an
online, GUI-based version of Archimedes is provided via the nanoHUB platform.
Genius [34] is available as a publicly accessible version under the GNU GPL. The FLOSS
version supports two-dimensional device simulation based on the drift-diffusion ( DD) model.
Lattice heating is taken into account by, for instance, a temperature corrected DD model. A
rich set of functionality is provided, such as various mobility models, an energy transport
model, and several impact-ionization models.
Gold Standard Simulations [35] specializes in simulating statistical variability in
nano-CMOS devices and provides corresponding commercial simulations tools. More
specifically, the tools support the physical simulation of statistical variability, statistical compact
model extraction, and statistical circuit simulation.
Minimos-NT [36][37] is the successor of the Minimos [38] simulator and is
commercially supported. Minimos-NT is a general-purpose semiconductor device simulator,
providing a general-purpose, multi-dimensional semiconductor device simulator. The
simulator supports stead-state, transient, and small-signal analysis of arbitrary devices.
Also, mixed-mode device and circuit simulations based on compact models are
supported.
nanoHUB is a platform hosting scientific tools, primarily in the field of
computational nanotechnology [39][40]. At the time of writing this thesis from the
total number of 325 tools 17 tools (corresponding to 5.2%) are tagged as open
source1 .
Figure 2.1 gives an overview of the accumulated code lines of each project. The Count Lines
of Code [41] tool has been used to quantify the code base implemented in languages such as
C/C++, Python, Matlab, and Fortran. Irrelevant data has been - to a large extent
- ignored, like comments and building instructions. Of the 17 open source tools
41% have between 100 and 1 000, 35% offer 1 000 to 10 000, and 24% provide 10
000 to 100 000 lines of code. Therefore, the majority of the available free open
source tools can be considered to be small to medium scale-size projects, further
underlining the lack of FLOSS-based device simulation tools of considerable size. Overall,
nanoHUB provides free registration for an online account, enabling the execution of tools
directly from within a web browser. The computational resources are provided by the
nanoHUB facilities, thus no compilation and/or installation procedure is required.
NanoTCAD ViDES [42] supports the simulation of nanoscale devices through the
self-consistent solution of the Poisson and the Schrödinger equations by means of the
Non-Equilibrium Green’s Function formalism. The tool allows for the simulation of transport in
graphene nanoribbons, carbon nanotubes, and two-dimensional (bilayer) graphene field-effect
transistors. The simulator is distributed as a Python module, utilizing high performance C
and Fortran based subroutines. The package is released under the BSD License.
Silvaco [43] provides a broad set of commercial simulation tools for TCAD,
interconnect modeling, and analog/mixed-signal/radio frequency analysis. A broad set of
modeling and analysis tools are provided, allowing for a wide range of simulations and
evaluations.
Synopsis [44] provides a plethora of commercial simulation tools, covering a variety of
application categories, such as TCAD, verification, manufacturing, and system-level design.
Extensive pre- and postprocessing facilities are provided, such as structure and mesh
generation as well as visualization.
ViennaSHE [45][46] is a multi-dimensional, self-consistent semiconductor device
simulator based on the deterministic solution of the Boltzmann Transport Equation using
Spherical Harmonics Expansions. ViennaSHE provides a standalone simulation application
as well as an API for utilizing the simulator by other implementations. The tool is released
under the MIT License and written in C++.
The presented open source simulation tools are highly specialized. However, they share the requirement for certain pre- and postprocessing software components. For instance, each tool requires visualization capabilities to enable investigations of the simulation results. Another typical requirement is the generation of the simulation domain and the access to material parameters. A detailed analysis of the available open source simulation tools leads to the conclusion that these tools treat these aspects in a marginal manner. For instance, only a static set of material parameters is supported, which is hard coded into the simulation code. This specific aspect introduces the need for a flexible material mechanism, providing simulation tools access to various material database backends. With respect to the commercially distributed simulation tools, the advantages and disadvantages, as introduced in Section 2.1, apply here in a similar manner.