An efficient physical device-circuit simulator and its application to accurate design of millimeter wave oscillators

A rigorous one-dimensional physical device-circuit simulator is developed to accurately determine the transport properties and the electrical performance of semiconductor devices embedded into a passive circuit. The simulator is well suited to study the effects of device geometry, doping level, bias voltage, and mounting structure on the performance and to compare the accuracy and the computational efficiency of different physical models. The model is applied to determine the application limits of the drift-diffusion and hydrodynamic models when they are used to characterize the operation and to optimize the structure of cm- and mm-wave oscillators with two-terminal devices, and to produce a set of design curves which indicate the performance limits of different devices under various operating conditions.