Fully Coupled Circuit and Device Simulation with Exploitation of Algebraic Multigrid Linear Solvers

Abstract:
Driving circuits with very high frequencies may influence the standard switching behavior of the incorporated semiconductor devices. This motivates us to use refined semiconductor models within circuit simulation. Lumped circuit models are combined with distributed semiconductor models which leads to coupled systems of differential-algebraic equations and partial differential equations (PDAEs). With MECS we implemented a combined circuit/device-simulation framework with model extraction from Minimos-NT and physics-oriented algebraic multigrid (AMG) for solving the arising systems of equations efficiently and robustly. Especially for the circuit part, the usual modified nodal approach had to be reformulated to make the matrices more suitable for AMG.