ABSTRACT
Modern silicon technologies, based on highly complex systems, require rigorous methods to predict the behaviour of electronic devices and the computational approach becomes essential. This chapter presents the important ingredients of any physical modelling of semiconductor devices. It focuses on the Drift-Diffusion (DD) framework, and provides the most commonly used techniques both in the industry and in the R & D field, the microscopic description of charge carriers transport, as well as its numerical treatment. The chapter discusses how the models are discretized before being implemented in a calculator. It presents a case study of a UFSD-based detector to show how theory applies to real life. The chapter couples standard carrier statistics and transport with advanced semiconductor physics to highlight the properties and issues of simulating the electrical behaviour and the operating performances of a real device.
