Particle-Based Device Modeling

The key concepts in standard device modeling, such as continuous carrier concentration and continuous current, are questionable when the average number of carriers is smaller than one electron or one hole. This is not a rare scenario because the average number of minority carriers in semiconductor devices is almost always smaller than one carrier. In this paper, we demonstrate that the carrier generation, recombination, thermionic emission, and tunneling can be modeled by equations developed for single-carrier events.