Every software package contains a full set of examples suitable for that version and are installed with the software. If you see examples here that are not in your installation you should consider updating to a later version of the software. These examples can be used by beginners and advanced users for product evaluation, teaching purposes, and self-training.
Required Modules
Victory Device
- 2D Simulator
This example demonstrates the simulation of a reverse SiC PiN Diode characteristic versus different levels of arithmetic precision.
The simulation of wide bandgap semiconductor devices is challenging mainly because the intrinsic carrier concentration is low. One solution to overcome this problem is to artificially increase the intrinsic carrier concentration. A more rigorous method is to use different levels of arithmetic precision.
For well-converged solutions, run-time increases with precision. The increase is especially significant at the highest precision levels.
On the other hand, certain problems (e.g., SiC devices) that have difficulty converging at the lower precision levels are likely to run faster as the precision level is increased. Accordingly, the optimal precision level for a given problem is likely to be the minimum level that produces good convergence during the solution.
The maximum precision that may be required for a well-converged solution can be estimated from the semiconductor bandgap. However, it is often possible to simulate a given device, under certain bias conditions with less than the maximum precision. Conversely, we can say that a given precision level supports bandgaps up to a certain value, and convergence may be difficult when simulating materials with higher bandgaps.
SiC may need to be simulated with a nominal precision of 256 bits. However, in this example and as mentioned above 160-bit precision is sufficient in this case.
In the first part of the input deck, a simple SiC PiN diode is created. Several breakdown voltage simulations are then performed with different combinations of arithmetic precision and intrinsic carrier concentration (NI.MIN). The level of arithmetic precision is set using the SIMFLAGS= “-128 ” parameter on the GO VICTORYDEVICE statement for 128-bit precision.
The ANISOTROPIC impact ionization model for SiC was used for all simulations.
Simulation times are extracted for all simulations in DeckBuild using EXTRACT NAME= “t ” CLOCK.TIME.
The results are plotted and overlaid in Victory Visual to show that the breakdown voltage is independent of the precision used in the simulation. As mentioned above, the 160-bit precision is sufficient to accurately simulate the leakage current.
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