New developments in the numerical approximation of the drift-diffusion semiconductor device equation

In this communication we deal with the coupling of the drift-diffusion system with a set of ordinary differential equations describing the kinetics of trapped carriers in a real-life problem arising from state-of-the-art optical communication systems. We propose an efficient block iterative algorithm based on Gauss-Seidel iterations to decouple the kinetic equations from the drift-diffusion equations; these latter are then solved by Krylov subspace iterations. Time advancing employs the backward Euler method and the spatial discretization is carried out by means of Mixed Finite Volumes. The proposed algorithm is applied to the simulation of the dynamics of a CdTe resistor subject to a very high bias.