A versatile harmonic balance method in a parallel framework

Abstract

In this paper, we present a parallelized and versatile harmonic balance approach for modeling the small-signal and large-signal frequency-domain response of the coupled semiconductor drift-diffusion equations used in TCAD device simulations. Our approach begins with a time-domain TCAD code, and we describe the process to adapt the system into the frequency domain so that the transformation can be parallelized. Both small-signal and large-signal analyses are easily simultaneously incorporated. Furthermore, we introduce the Isofrequency Remapping Scheme, so that an arbitrary number of high frequencies can be analyzed without introducing a prohibitive expense. Results obtained by our small-signal and large signal harmonic balance methods are shown to capture the same response for a linear device, as expected. Further results use our harmonic balance method to explore a prohibitively expensive time-domain problem: a large-signal, two-tone simulation too costly for a time-domain analysis, for which we are able to produce the expected response with intermodulation.