Space-Time Galerkin Least Squares Finite Element Method

The space-time Galerkin least squares finite element method has been successfully applied to the formulation and solution of the Hydrodynamic model for carrier transport in semiconductor devices. This model involves the solution of a coupled system of partial differential equations consisting of the hydrodynamic equations for electrons and holes which are symmetric incompletely parabolic and the elliptic Poisson equation for the electrostatic potential. We consider a posteriori error estimates for this coupled system suitable for providing error indicators for an h-adaptive finite element solution scheme.

Our first approach measures the error in the Poisson equation and drives the mesh-refinement for the coupled system based solely on this error. We use an asymptotically exact residual-based error indicator for elliptic problems which relies on solving local Neumann problems in each element. The solution of the positive-definite linear system for every element is of the size equal to the dimension of the space of 'bubble' functions. The estimator is robust in the sense that it works well for both 1D and 2D problems and in both pre-asymptotic and asymptotic ranges. Also, since the computations are local involving only one or a few neighbouring elements at a time, the implementation is almost completely vectorizable and parallelizable.

Amit Agarwal (agarwal@gloworm.Stanford.EDU)
AEL 211
Integrated Circuits Laboratory
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-4055