The Utility of Modeling and Simulation in Determining Transport Performance Properties of Semiconductors

The RKDG method has been effectively used in modeling and simulating semiconductor devices, where the underlying models are hydrodynamic in nature. These include classical as well as quantum models. In this paper, we survey and interpret some of these results. For classical transport, we review the simulation of a benchmark MESFET transistor by means of discontinuous Galerkin methods of degree one. For quantum transport, we report the success in simulation of the resonant tunneling diode. The principal features here are negative differential resistance and hysteresis.