Design concepts and backgrounds of a 3-dimensional semiconductor process simulator are presented. It is designed to become a basis of developing semiconductor process models. An input language is designed to realize flexibly controlling simulation sequence, and its interpreter program is designed to accept external software to be controlled and to be integrated into a system. To realize data-exchanges between the process simulator and other software, a self-describing data-file format is designed and related program libraries are developed. A C++ class for solving drift-diffusion type partial-differential-equation in a three-dimensional space is developed.

This paper proposes the GDV system, which provides a format-independent interface with which to access documents in various formats. It also proposes a new approach for document representation to be used in the GDV system. In this approach, a document is represented by a chain of objects, each of which belongs to a certain class and transforms access operations according to the class-specific transformation rule. A user's request is interpreted as a request to the uppermost object of the chain, transformed by objects in the chain successively, and executed by the lowermost object in the chain. The initial state of a document is an object chain containing an unidentified object. As the unidentified object identifies and divides itself, classification (and chain generation) proceeds step by step.