A new approach to fully unstructured three-dimensional Delaunay mesh generation with improved element quality

Abstract

Mesh generation is known to play a critical role in semiconductor device and process simulation. We present a new approach suitable for dealing with the increasing complexity of the device boundaries and interfaces as well as moving boundaries. It is recently understood that techniques which have worked well in the past (octree methods, intersection and bisection based methods, cartesian methods) are at their limits today. It is in this spirit that we developed a fully unstructured gridding method which we believe is the only potential way to deal with the complexity of future devices and to handle moving boundary situations. Our algorithm also incorporates local improvement of element quality by non-delaunay quality measures, while still maintaining the Delaunay property.