Representing and manipulating fields for TCAD

Abstract

abs Representing and manipulating fields forms the heart of Technology CAD. Despite bread similarities in data and algorithms across many tools, detailed differences make tool integration and code sharing during tool development much more difficult than it needs to be. The effort wasted recreating code and repeatedly adapting imported tools to local environments would be better expended in improving the state of the physical models and in improving the usability of tool collections. The TCAD Framework aims to improve this situation by providing standard representations and functions to operate on them. Initially the framework provides common ground to ease the integration of simulation tools. Ultimately the framework will provide a rich development environment to allow new tools to be created more easily. This paper describes an initial architecture for representing Field information, and the results of developing and testing a prototype implementation.