Electric Circuit Modeling and the Semiconductor Device Models
Electrical circuit modeling capabilities are useful when simulating all sorts of electrical and electromechanical devices ranging from heaters and motors to advanced plasma reactors in the semiconductor industry. There are two fundamental ways that an electrical circuit model relates to a physical field model.
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The field model is used to get a better, more accurate description of a single device in the electrical circuit model.
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The electrical circuit is used to drive or terminate the device in the field model in such a way that it makes more sense to simulate both as a tightly coupled system.
The Electrical Circuit interface makes it possible to add nodes representing circuit elements directly to the Model Builder tree in a COMSOL Multiphysics model. The circuit variables can then be connected to a physical device model to perform co-simulations of circuits and multiphysics. The model acts as a device connected to the circuit so that its behavior is analyzed in larger systems.
The fundamental equations solved by the Electrical Circuit interface are Kirchhoff’s circuit laws, which in turn can be deduced from Maxwell’s equations. The supported study types are Stationary, Frequency Domain, and Time Dependent.
There are three more advanced large-signal semiconductor device features available in the Electrical Circuit interface. The equivalent circuits and the equations defining their nonideal circuit elements are described in this section. For a more complete treatise on semiconductor device modeling, see
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