Written by Jeff Bude and Kent Smith of AT&T Bell Laboratories, SMC (Simplex Monte Carlo) is a Full band Monte Carlo code for silicon that can simulate both electron and hole transport in arbitrary two-dimensional device structure. There are two other Monte Carlo codes at nanoHUB: DEMON simulates single carrier (electron) transport in one-dimensional device, while MOCA simulates single carrier (electron) transport in 2D structures like SOI MOSFET. The two carrier, full band feature of SMC allows the code to simulate – among other things – impact ionization of hot carriers and allows one to infer the reliability properties of transistors. Compared to typical Monte Carlo codes, SMC runs much faster, because of its innovative gridding of the k-space, and it use of frozen self-consistent solution from the drift-diffusion code as the potential profile.

Jeff Bude and Kent Smith are the primary authors of the code. Some of the translation codes for data transfer between the drift-diffusion simulator and SMC were developed by Haldun Kufluoglu and Dhanoop Varghese.

Thanks to Steven Clark, Dhanoop Varghese, and Nauman Butt for helping to design and debug the Rappture interface.

For a description of the theoretical basis and the implementation of SMC, see J. Bude and R.K. Smith, “Phase-space simplex Monte Carlo for semiconductor transport”, Semiconductor Science and Technology, 9, pp. 840-843, 1994. For typical applications, see J.D. Bude, “Monte Carlo Simulation of Impact Ionization Feedback”, VLSI Design, 1998; J.D. Bude, M.R. Pinto, R.K. Smith, “Monte Carlo Simulation of the CHISEL Flash Memory Cell”, IEEE Trans. On Elec. Devices, 47(10), p. 1873, 2000; D. Varghese, et al., “Universality of off-state Degradation in Drain-Extended MOSFET”, IEDM Technical Digest, 2006. Basic theory of Monte Carlo simulation is described in “Fundamentals of Carrier Transport” by Mark Lundstrom (ISBN 0521631343).

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

J. Bude and R.K. Smith, “Phase-space simplex Monte Carlo for semiconductor transport”, Semiconductor Science and Technology, 9, pp. 840-843, 1994.

• jeff bude; kent smith; Steven Clark; Haldun Kufluoglu; dhanoop varghese; Nauman Zafar Butt (2011), "SMC," https://nanohub.org/resources/smc. (DOI: 10.4231/D3SN0141H).

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