Accelerating Nano-scale Transistor Innovation though Petascale Simulation

Purdue University, West Lafayette IN

Investigators

Abstract

Accelerating Nano-scale Transistor Innovation though Petascale Simulation Gerhard Klimeck Purdue University Forty years of transistor downscaling has led to atomic-scale features, making devices subject to unavoidable manufacturing irregularities at the atomic scale. A new approach to design that embraces the atomistic, quantum mechanical (QM) nature of the constituent materials is necessary to develop more powerful yet energy miserly devices. This demands the solution of non-equilibrium statistical QM in systems in excess of tens of million complex degrees of freedom. Computations of this magnitude have been impossible, due to the lack of sufficiently powerful computers. Petascale computing creates an opportunity to pursue a multi-scale design approach. We will develop a general-purpose simulation engine, which will model out-of-equilibrium electron transport in realistically extended devices in an atomistic material description containing millions of atoms using the non-equilibrium Green function (NEGF) formalism. The principal investigator developed NEMO1D, the first NEGF-based commercial-grade device simulator, and NEMO3D, which calculates electronic structure (no NEGF) for systems larger than 52 million atoms. The codes have been shown to scale to more than 16,000 and 8,000 cores, respectively. The project expects to extend the NEGF capabilities of NEMO1D with the NEMO3D electronic structure description to form the next generation engineering toolkit, OMEN. This work hopes to enable the discovery of new technologies for faster switching, smaller feature size, and reduced heat generation. The creation of a new switch has the potential to revitalize the semiconductor industry in 2015. Existing modeling and simulation tools have followed the path of downscaling from a macroscopic understanding where materials are a smooth continuum and electrons are classical particles. At the nanometer scale the material must be described with discrete atomic resolution and electrons follow quantum mechanics and no tools exist for realistic devices. This project aims to build such a tool. OMEN will be an open source community code released through nanoHUB.org. NEMO3D already embodies the envisioned future use of OMEN where a highly scalable tool can answer a broad range of problems, covering ranges of computational intensity, for a broad range of users. Over 1,000 users have used an educational version of NEMO3D since its release.