MIXED ELEMENT TREES - A GENERALIZATION OF MODIFIED OCTREES FOR THE GENERATION OF MESHES FOR THE SIMULATION OF COMPLEX 3-D SEMICONDUCTOR-DEVICE STRUCTURES

This paper addresses the problem of the allocation of spatial grids fo r complex nonplanar three-dimensional (3-D) semiconductor device struc tures. We have characterized the class of meshes suitable for the inte gration of the device equations with the usual numerical schemes as be ing a subclass of the class of Delaunay meshes. We propose an algorith m for the efficient generation of such admissible meshes based on the iterative refinement of coarse elements. The generated meshes permit a n exact geometrical modeling of rather general domain boundaries of mo dern silicon devices avoiding the ''obtuse angle problem'' by construc tion.