Victory Atomistic
Victory Atomistic:
atomistic simulation and quantum transport
When bulk parameters stop describing your device, Victory Atomistic solves it atom by atom and hands better-calibrated parameters back to your TCAD flow.
What Victory Atomistic does
Victory Atomistic models your device atom by atom. It solves quantum transport using non-equilibrium Green’s functions (NEGF). Structures run from a few atoms to around a million, the range where continuum device models give out. Each material starts as a tight-binding description, so confinement, strain relaxation and phonon modes are calculated, not fitted. That’s the case for atomistic simulation when a new material or an advanced node arrives with no calibration history.
Capabilities
Quantum transport
A self-consistent Schrödinger–Poisson solver sets the electrostatics. NEGF then gives you I-V characteristics with coherent and incoherent scattering included. When a question doesn’t need full NEGF, you can answer it faster with top-of-the-barrier transport or the Quantum Transmission Boundary Method (QTBM). Force-field relaxation finds the strained geometry before any of it runs.
Scattering
Carrier scattering is solved self-consistently in the Born approximation, not bolted on afterward. That covers electron-phonon (acoustic, polar and non-polar), surface roughness and impurities. Leave it out and you get a ballistic current: an upper bound, not a prediction.
Structure and materials
You define the device by material, domain and region. Pseudoepitaxy and passivation rules then build the lattice, boundary conditions included. The tight-binding database holds established and novel microelectronics materials, from bulk to 2D layers. Band structure comes from those parameters or from Wannier90 Hamiltonians. Supported symmetries are zincblende, wurtzite, simple-cubic, diamond and trigonal, which covers graphene and BiTe.
Scale and performance
A handful of atoms or a million, in the same tool. Mode-space and Büttiker-probe techniques cut the cost of the transport calculation itself. Multilevel MPI parallelization then spreads what remains, and massively parallel runs across hundreds of thousands of compute nodes are possible. You set up and review every run in Silvaco’s TCAD interactive tools.
Where it sits in the TCAD flow
Victory Atomistic runs beside the main Victory chain, not inside it.
You solve the effect a continuum model can’t capture, then carry the answer into Victory Device.
In
Material and structure definitions
Applications
2D material devices, including transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDs)
Quantum dots and wells, where confinement defines the device
Electron transport with scattering in advanced CMOS, TFETs, FinFETs, nanowires and slabs
Optical devices, including LEDs
Topological insulators and experimental device structures
Technology partner
Purdue University
Victory Atomistic began as NEMO5, the NEGF-based quantum transport code Purdue built and Silvaco licensed. If you've run NEMO in research, you already know the physics underneath.
Simulation Standard
August 2022
A silicon nanowire FET with a small cross-section, run through NEGF with several electron-phonon scattering mechanisms, for devices at 5 nm and below. The optimized solver gets you a usable I-V curve within a day on an affordable modern computer.
TCAD resources
Victory Atomistic resources
Evaluate and engage
Evaluating it
Bring the effect your continuum model gets wrong: leakage it underestimates, or a threshold shift it can't reproduce. You'll know whether atomistic simulation can settle it before you put a single run behind it.
Downloads and documentation
Licensed users get installers and manuals through Support and Downloads. The product brief and the practical-simulation deck need no login.
Support
With a current maintenance contract, you open a case in the support portal and follow it there until it's resolved.
Questions about atomistic simulation
What is atomistic device simulation?
It models a device as the lattice of atoms it really is, rather than as a continuum with averaged material properties. Band structure, confinement and strain then emerge from how the atoms sit. Nothing has to be supplied as a fitted parameter, and fitted parameters are exactly what a new material doesn't have yet.
When do I need atomistic simulation instead of a conventional device simulator?
When bulk parameters like effective mass and bandgap stop meaning much, and the wave nature of carriers starts deciding transport. That happens at 5 nm and below, in nanosheets and nanowires, and in quantum dots and 2D-material channels. Before that point, a drift-diffusion simulator such as Victory Device is the faster tool.
What is NEGF and why does it matter for small devices?
Non-equilibrium Green's functions (NEGF) is a quantum formalism for transport through a device under bias, which is where a working nanoscale transistor always is. It returns I-V characteristics with coherent and incoherent scattering included, so tunneling and phonon interactions get calculated instead of patched in as correction terms.
How large a structure can Victory Atomistic simulate?
Around a million atoms at the top end, and down to just a few. Reaching that ceiling takes method as much as hardware. Mode-space projection and Büttiker probes shrink the problem before MPI parallelization ever sees it, so large structures still finish in realistic simulation times.
Does it support 2D materials?
Yes. The tight-binding database runs from bulk materials to 2D layers, and transition-metal dichalcogenides are among the devices you can simulate with it. If your material has no tight-binding parameter set yet, you can bring its band structure in from a Wannier90 Hamiltonian instead.
How do atomistic results feed into Victory Device?
They give Victory Device sharper parameters for its classical and semi-classical models. You pay the atomic-resolution cost once, on the small piece that needs it, and the full device then runs at continuum speed. Atomistic simulation stays a calibration step in your flow, not a replacement for it.
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