PMC-3D - A PARALLEL 3-DIMENSIONAL MONTE-CARLO SEMICONDUCTOR-DEVICE SIMULATOR

We present PMC-3D, a parallel three-dimensional (3-D) Monte Carlo devi ce simulator for multiprocessors. The parallel algorithm is an extensi on of the standard Monte Carlo device simulation model in 3-D, in whic h the particle dynamics generated from the stochastic Monte Carlo meth od are solved simultaneously with Poisson's equation on a 3-D mesh usi ng finite differences. Due to the large computational requirements of 3-D device simulation, it is necessary to parallelize both the Poisson solver and the Monte Carlo simulation phase of the device simulator. The parallel algorithms were implemented on a 1024-node distributed me mory nCUBE multicomputer and a 4-node shared memory Ardent multiproces sor. We validate the accuracy of our implementations by generating the static characteristics of a MESFET and present test results on the fi xed and scaled speedups obtained on the two types of parallel computer s. Improvements in performance are observed utilizing dynamic load bal ancing for the distributed memory case.