Abstract: In the second session, Dr. Klimeck will give a brief overview of ABACUS and demonstrate the PN Junction Lab. With the PN Junction Lab, students can explore band edge diagrams and charge distributions as a function of bias. They can see how the bands move and how the depletion region narrows and widens. Students can change the doping levels and explore shallow versus wide junctions. Learners with a deeper interest can dive into the effects of minority carrier relaxation times and resistive behavior in realistic devices. The PN Junction Lab is powered “under the hood” with an industrial strength simulation engine that was designed and used at Bell Labs to model and produce a variety of different electronic devices.

Series Information: Recent economic needs have re-kindled national and global interest in semiconductor devices and created an urgent need for more semiconductor device engineers and architects. Current students will need to be trained in the fundamentals of semiconductor devices to meet this growing semiconductor demand. Dr. Klimeck will introduce the r tools found in the ABACUS tool suite in nanoHUB He developed these tools to teach his standard semiconductor device class at Purdue University. These tools include simulations of: crystal structures and lattices, bandstructure and band models, bulk semiconductors, PN Junctions, Bipolar Junction Transistors, MOS Capacitors, and MOSFETs. The ABACUS tool suite is very popular, and has been used by over 15,000 users and in over 350 classes globally. The ABACUS group page highlights various features and animations.

The objective of this recitation series is to enable faculty to enhance existing or new semiconductor classes with interactive simulations. Simulations and animations can immerse students into “what if?” scenarios and engage them in more active forms of learning, including explorations used in homework assignments and design projects.

Speaker Bio: Dr. Gerhard Klimeck is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University; Director of the Network for Computational Nanotechnology; Reilly Director of the Center for Predictive Materials and Devices. He helped to create nanoHUB.org, the largest virtual nanotechnology user facility serving over 2.0 million global users, annually.

1. PN Junction Lab
2. pn junctions
3. semiconductor devices
4. semiconductors