Accurate numerical models for simulation of radiation events in nano-scale semiconductor devices

Space and ground-level electronic equipment with devices of nanometer scale and extremely high densities may be strongly affected by ionizing radiation. Accurate numerical models are necessary for better analysis of radiation effects and design of radiation tolerant devices. Numerical models and adaptive dynamic 3D mesh generation presented in this paper enable efficient simulations of transient semiconductor device response to realistic multi-branched track, produced by ionizing particle and nuclear reactions. A description of the numerical models, adaptive 3D meshing approach, and efficient solution method for large 3D problems using unstructured meshes is provided. The developed approach efficiently uses computer resources, which makes possible solution of transient 3D multi-branched ion strike problems with 100,000 mesh nodes within 512MB computer memory.