A NEW NONLINEAR RELAXATION SCHEME FOR SOLVING SEMICONDUCTOR-DEVICE EQUATIONS

In most cases steady-state semiconductor device equations are either solved simultaneously by Newton's method, by Gummel's decoupled nonlinear relaxation scheme, or a combination of both. A framework deriving such different iterative methods from underlying variable transformations is presented. Within that framework the introduction of a new variable establishes a new nonlinear relaxation scheme, which is significantly faster than Gummel's scheme in cases where it converges slowly, thereby avoiding the drawbacks of a simultaneous solution method.