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The aim of this paper is to compare the most common time‐ and frequency‐domain numerical techniques for the determination of the steady‐state solution in the physics‐based simulation of a semiconductor device driven by a time‐periodic generator.

The shooting and harmonic balance (HB) techniques are applied to the solution of the discretized drift‐diffusion device model coupled to the external circuit embedding the semiconductor device, thus providing a fully nonlinear mixed mode simulation.

The comparison highlights the strong and weak points of the two approaches, basically showing that the time‐domain solution is more robust with respect to the initial condition, while the HB solution provides a more rapid convergence once the initial datum is close enough to the solution itself.

The contribution compares two numerical techniques for the determination of the steady‐state solution of nonlinear dynamical systems, popular in the area of RF circuit analysis but rarely applied to device simulation. In particular, this is the first application of the shooting method to forced devices.