We report on a fruitful combination of applying academic experience with formal modelling and verification techniques to an industrial case study. The goal of the case study was to investigate a priori, i.e. before implementation, the effects of adding a lightweight and easy-to-use publish/subscribe (event) notification service to thinkteam--an asynchronous and dispersed groupware system which was developed by think3. Researchers from the Formal Methods and Tools (FM&T) group of ISTI-CNR--with a longstanding experience in research on the development and application of formal methods, notations, and software tools for the specification, design, and verification of complex computer systems--therefore teamed up with think3--a global provider of integrated product development solutions that provides mechanical design and Product Data Management (PDM) software catering the product management needs of design processes in the manufacturing industry. The technical details of this joint research effort have been documented elsewhere, here we report on the lessons learned from this experience.

An algorithm allowing the automatic generation of a mesh and accounting for the main physical features of the problem is presented. The adaptivity is provided by a refinement strategy which preserves the characteristics of the initial grid, inserting nodes only in the regions where the solution deviates from a linear behavior. A geometrical interpretation in terms of a monitor surface is given, and various different approaches to the problem are discussed. The efficiency of the algorithm is enhanced by a local solution scheme, which uses previously computed values of all the unknown quantities as boundary conditions for the newly generated nodes. A few examples illustrate the performance of the algorithm.>

A discretization scheme is applied to the hydrodynamic model for semiconductor devices that generalizes the Scharfetter-Gummel method to both the momentum-conservation and the energy-conservation equations. The major advantages of the scheme are: (1) the discretization is carried out without neglecting any terms, thus providing a satisfactory description of such effects as velocity overshoot and carrier heating; and (2) the resulting equations lend themselves to a self-consistent solution procedure similar to those currently used to solve the simpler drift-diffusion equations. Two-dimensional steady-state simulations of an n-channel MOSFET and of an n-p-n BJT (bipolar junction transistor) have been carried out by means of an improved version of the program HFIELDS. Carrier-temperature plots have been obtained with a reasonable computational effort, demonstrating the efficiency of this technique. The results have been compared with those obtained with the standard drift-diffusion model and significant differences in the electron concentration have been found, especially at the drain end of the MOSFET channel.>