Abstract: In the fourth session, Dr. Gerhard Klimeck will give a brief overview of ABACUS and demonstrate the Drift-Diffusion-Lab. Students can experiment with a semiconductor slab under bias and / or light illumination. They can explore how illumination from the top of an intrinsic semiconductor increases the overall current and separates the hole and electron distribution across the device. They can change the light intensity and the location of the illumination. Different materials such as Si, SiGe, and GaAs can be explored. Detailed parameters such as minority carrier lifetimes or surface recombination times can be modified in numerical experiments to explore the concepts. Drift-Diffusion-Lab is powered by the industrial tool PADRE which was used at Bell Labs to design transistors.

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. ABACUS
2. drift-diffusion
3. Drift-Diffusion Lab
4. semiconductor devices
5. semiconductors
6. tool:abacus