Sesame is a Python3 package for solving the drift diffusion Poisson equations for multi-dimensional systems using finite differences.
The software computes the steady state of a semiconductor between two contacts, and subject to voltage bias and/or illumination. It was developed to study polycrystalline solar cells containing charged interfaces (grain boundaries, sample surface). Sesame handles single charged states and continuum of defect states alike.
Sesame includes modules that can be used in Python code as well as a standalone GUI (contained in app.py of the head directory of the distribution). Example scripts and GUI input files can be found in the examples directories. The documentation includes tutorials describing example scripts. Online documentation can be found here .
Support for this project comes from the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Maryland.
- Building Sesame requires
- The following software is highly recommended though not strictly required:
- Matplotlib 1.1 or newer, for Sesame's plotting routines. Matplotlib is required when using the graphical interface of Sesame.
- MUMPS, a sparse linear algebra library that will in many cases speed up Sesame several times and reduce the memory footprint. (Sesame uses only the sequential, single core version of MUMPS. The advantages due to MUMPS as used by Sesame are thus independent of the number of CPU cores of the machine on which Sesame runs.)
- An environment which allows to compile Python extensions written in C, C++ and Fortran.
The graphical user interface requires PyQt5.
For users with no python installation, a convenient standalone installation which automatically includes all of the requisiste libraries and packages is Anaconda .
Sesame can be built and installed following the usual Python conventions by running the following commands in the root directory of the Sesame distribution:
python setup.py build python setup.py install
Depending on your system, you might have to run the second command with
administrator privileges. The installation
step can be done locally either by using the --user prefix:
python setup.py install --user
or by specifying the location where to install the package files with
--prefix=/path/of/directory.
The tutorial examples can be found in the directory examples inside the root
directory of the Sesame source distribution.
To build the documentation, the Sphinx documentation generator is required (version 1.4 or newer) with numpydoc
extension (version 0.5 or newer), and Latex.
HTML documentation is built by entering the doc sub-directory of the Sesame
package and executing make html. Open the file index.html in the
directory build/html with a web browser to access the documentation. PDF
documentation is generated by executing make latex followed by make
latexpdf. The pdf file is generated in build/latex.
Because of some quirks of how Sphinx works, it might be necessary to execute
make clean between building HTML and PDF documentation. If this is not
done, Sphinx may mistakenly use PNG files for PDF output or other problems may
appear.
As an alternative if make is not available, the HTML documentation can be built
using the command from the root directory:
python setup.py build_sphinx
The documentation is produced in doc/build/html. To build the PDF file:
python setup.py build_sphinx -b latex cd doc/build/latex make all-pdf
The resulting PDF is produced in doc/build/latex.