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P. Paul Ruden, Associate Fellow

Properties of Semiconductor Materials and Devices

The electronic structure and related properties of semiconductor materials and novel devices are being calculated. Previously, this work focused on calculations of the electronic structures of quantum wires and on transport simulations for large band-gap III-nitride materials using Monte Carlo technique. Current emphasis is on the modeling of strain effects in III-V heterostructure devices in the framework of the finite element method. Additional work is focusing on further Monte Carlo transport simulations for large band gap materials and on the creation of device models for large gap semiconductor devices. The last topic requires significantly higher levels of precision than conventional semiconductor device modeling, primarily due to the much wider range of values assumed by variables such as the electron and hole concentrations.

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Another project, dealing with three-dimensional mesh generation for GaN device modeling, is currently underway. These researchers have developed a three-dimensional finite element code for thermal modeling of GaN heterojunction field effect transistors (HFET). They are using the finite element mesh generation package gambit on the IBM SP as the pre-processor for the code. The technical difficulty that justifies the use of gambit is that the model demands the ratio of the smallest feature size within the domain and linear dimension of the boundary to be ten thousand. Hence, good graphic visualization and heavy computation is required to generate the correct mesh. The success of modeling will have positive impact on the prediction of the power performance of GaN HFET.

This information is available in alternative formats upon request by individuals with disabilities. Please send email to alt-format@msi.umn.edu or call 612-624-0528.

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