Don Scharfetter

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Donald Lee Scharfetter (born February 21, 1934 in Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania , USA , † September 23, 2000 in Los Altos , California , USA) was an American electrical engineer . His research area was numerical calculations of semiconductor structures .

Life

Immediately after graduating from high school in 1952, he joined the Air Force ( US Air Force ) during the Korean War to use the regulations of the GI Bill .

In early 1953, he was relocated to McCoy Air Base in Orlando, Florida near Winter Park , where Rollins College is also located. On the air base he took evening classes for college teachers and went to Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie-Mellon University) Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania , after serving in the army in 1956 . There he set a university record by gaining a bachelor's degree in 1960, a master's degree in 1961 and a doctorate ( Ph.D. ) as an electrical engineer in 1962.

In 1962 he began his work at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc. , Murray Hill (New Jersey) , which lasted 15 years. From the total of four bosses at that time, he particularly highlighted the second after completing his professional life on the occasion of an award: Hermann Gummel , with whom he worked on the numerical solution of the semiconductor equations, from which Scharfetter's most famous publication emerged (Scharfetter-Gummel Discretization).

In later years at Bell, Scharfetter was responsible for developing computer support for the design of microwave systems and transistor structures, and for facilities for the design and testing of silicon ICs . In 1976 Scharfetter received the prestigious IEEE Fellow award "for contributions to computer modeling of solid-state microwave power sources and other semi-conductor devices" . In 1977 Scharfetter became a professor at Carnegie-Mellon University , but in 1978 he went to Xerox PARC (Los Altos Hills) to lead the establishment of the IC prototyping laboratory. In 1987 he moved to Intel and stayed there until the end of his working life in 1999.

Already seriously ill, he received the EDS Award for his professional life achievement in September 2000 at the SISPAD 2000 in Seattle , Washington: "for seminal contribution to the computer modeling of power semiconductor devices". In response to this, he reflected in detail on his life path.

plant

Scharfetter-Gummel discretization

The system of equations named after van Roosbroeck is used to determine the electrical potential and current densities of electrons and holes in semiconductor arrangements as a result of drift and diffusion .

The typically exponentially increasing or decreasing concentration profiles of dopants and therefore also of electrons and holes in semiconductor materials lead to numerical instabilities when using the standard formulas of finite differences . As a way out, Scharfetter and Gummel solved the current density approaches as separate differential equations along the route between two finite difference network points, assuming that the current density between two network points is constant and the electrical potential is linearly variable.

This gave them discretization formulas with exponential terms for the respective current density , so that the characteristics of the concentration profiles are mapped and numerically stable estimates for the current densities are obtained. In the original publication by Scharfetter and Gummel from 1969, a diode structure was calculated geometrically 1-dimensional.

Today the Scharfetter-Gummel discretization is used in the research of semiconductor structures for higher-dimensional problems and for more extensive physics .

Fonts

  • HK Gummel and DL Scharfetter: Avalanche Region of IMPATT Diodes . In: Bell Syst. Tech. J. Band 45 , no. 10 , 1966, pp. 1797--1827 , doi : 10.1002 / j.1538-7305.1966.tb02436.x .
  • DP Siewiorek, DE Thomas, and DL Scharfetter: The Use of LSI Modules in Computer Structures: Trends and Limitations . In: Computer . tape 11 , no. 7 , 1978, p. 16--25 , doi : 10.1109 / CM.1978.218261 .

literature

  • PA Farell and EC Gartland, Jr .: " On the Scharfetter-Gummel Discretization for Drift-Diffusion Continuity Equations ", in: "Computational Methods for Boundary and Interior Layers in Several Dimensions", JJH Miller (ed.), P. 51– 79, Boole Press, Dublin, Ireland, (1991)
  • Geoffrey Dummer : Electronic inventions and discoveries: Electronics from its earliest beginnings to the present day . 4. revised u. extended Edition. Institute of Physics Publishing, Bristol and Philadelphia 1997, ISBN 978-0-7503-0376-7 , pp. 200 (there entry on transistor modeling beginning 1964 with HK Gummel).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ " 1976 IEEE Fellows of the North Jersey Section (photo) " ( PDF file, 1.3 MB)
  2. ^ " A Century of Honors ", list of all IEEE Fellows up to 1984, entry DL Scharfetters on p. 375 ( PDF file, 71 MB)
  3. ↑ Don Scharfetter's acceptance speech after receiving the "Electronic Device Simulation (EDS)" award at SISPAD 2000 ( PDF file, 0.05 MB)
  4. ^ W. van Roosbroeck: Theory of the flow of electrons and holes in germanium and other semiconductors . In: Bell System Techn. Journal . tape 29 , no. 5 , 1950, pp. 560-607 , doi : 10.1002 / j.1538-7305.1950.tb03653.x .
  5. ↑ DL Scharfetter and HK Gummel: Large-signal analysis of a silicon Read diode oscillator . In: IEEE Trans. Electron Devices . ED-16, No. 1 , 1969, p. 64-77 , doi : 10.1109 / T-ED.1969.16566 .
  6. ↑ Thomas Koprucki, Nella Rotundo, Patricio Farrell, Duy Hai Doan and Jürgen Fuhrmann: On thermodynamic consistency of a Scharfetter-Gummel scheme based on a modified thermal voltage for drift-diffusion equations with diffusion enhancement . In: Opt. Quant. Electron. tape 47 , no. 6 , 2015, p. 1327-1332 , doi : 10.1007 / s11082-014-0050-9 .
personal data
SURNAME Scharfetter, Don
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Scharfetter, Donald Lee
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American electrical engineer
DATE OF BIRTH February 21, 1934
PLACE OF BIRTH Pittsburgh
DATE OF DEATH September 23, 2000
Place of death Los Altos (California)