| As the processing technology for the fabrication of GaAs/AlGaAs compound semiconductor devices continues to advance, the structure and physics of the devices become increasingly more complicated and involved. A numerical analysis tool provides a better understanding of the effect of various process and device parameters in the design and optimization process. In this work, a 3-dimensional heterostructure semiconductor device simulator is developed to obtain the steady-state characteristics of compound semiconductor devices fabricated from materials having position dependent material properties such as band-gap, electron affinity, permittivity, and the density of states functions.;The simulator performs numerical solutions to the semiconductor partial differential equations, namely the Poisson's equation and the two carrier Boltzmann's transport equations, using finite difference discretization. The computations involved are all performed on the Cray XMP/24 supercomputer. The Gummel iteration method which computes one equation at a time is implemented to find a self-consistent solution using the sparse matrix technique.;The simulator can be applied to a variety of heterojunction bipolar transistors fabricated by standard epitaxial growth. Structures with abrupt and graded emitter-base junction are compared. Two-dimensional and three-dimensional simulation results are demonstrated. The results obtained from this study are in agreement with those reported in the literature. |
