In the semiconductor industry the importance of Computer Aided Materials Analysis (CAMA) is growing rapidly due to ever decreasing feature sizes on semiconductor wafers. Due to the fact that the excitation volume is often larger than the typical feature size on a processed state-of-the-art semiconductor wafer it was necessary to extend SeSAME, a Monte Carlo simulator for arbitrary 2- dimensional geometries, to be able to handle arbitrarily shaped 3-dimensional structures. This is achieved by using a so called multi-quadtree approach for the discretization of 3-dimensional geometries.

A multi-quadtree consists of several parallel arranged modified quadtrees. This means, an arbitrarily shaped 3-dimensional structure is divided into parallel slices of constant geometry in direction perpendicular to the quadtree plane. The number of such 2-dimensional slices and the thickness of these slices is solely limited by the available memory. Therefore, really 3-dimensional structures may be resolved in principal with any resolution.