High Performance ATHENA and ATLAS Simulation on PC under NT

The recent advances in PC hardware capability in terms of memory and CPU floating point performance has allowed the possibility of running realistic sized ATHENA and ATLAS problems on PCs. The Fall 1999 release of PC-TCAD will include all the important features of the latest UNIX release. A product chart showing the modules available on PC is in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Products available in the Fall 99 release of PC-TCAD

The Fall 99 PC-TCAD release is ported to Windows NT4.0. It features PC specific interactive tools based on the popular UNIX products but with the look and feel of true NT products. There is also a dedicated PC Interactive tools manual. A view of the products in action is shown in Figure 2.

One of the most common concerns about ATHENA and ATLAS running on PC is the performance. Six examples from our standard UNIX example set were chosen. These represented a cross section of typical applications:

• • MOS shallow junction formation using fully coupled diffusion with {311} implant damage
  • SOI Id/Vds using impact ionization, energy balance and lattice heating
  • AlGaAs HEMT IV characterization
  • BJT switching simulation using MixedMode
  • LDMOS power device breakdown including full process simulation
  • Power Diode simulation using a large simulation mesh