Automatic 3D Mesh Generation for Process and Device Simulation

Tao Chen is working on automatic 3D mesh generation for process and device simulation. Being able to mesh a semiconductor device for simulation tools is an important service for TCAD tool development. For any numerical computation based simulator, a mesh fine enough at some region to achieve reasonable computation accuracy while coarse enough at other regions to better utilize the limited computation power is necessary but difficult to generate. A good mesh can greatly enhance the performance of a numerical simulator.

An OCTREE based 3D mesh generator (SMB3D) has been developed coupled with the level control function [1]. Currently it is being incorporated into SWR (a 3D information model for future process and device simulators) geometric and field servers, so that the output of SMB3D can be readily used by other simulators. After that, there are plans to build a 3D mesh generator which will perform adaptive meshing with moving boundaries and remeshing with changing fields.

[1] D. Yang, K. Law, R. Dutton, "An Automated Mesh Refinement Scheme Based On Level Control Function", NUPAD IV Digest, pp. 181 - 189, Seattle, May 31 - June 1, 1992.

Tao Chen (tchen@gloworm.Stanford.EDU)
AEL
Integrated Circuits Laboratory
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-4055