Results from numerical simulations

A short C program was written by the author to calculate the output electron probability distributions for multiplication registers with stages described by either model 1 or by model 2. The software could simulate a wide range of register gains with a variable number of gain stages. Simulations of multiplication registers which had similar numbers of stages to the registers in existing L3Vision CCDs typically took a few seconds on a year 2000 vintage PC. Two example curves produced by this software were included in Mackay et al. (2001).

A small number of Monte Carlo simulations were undertaken to verify the accuracy of the software - to obtain statistically useful results these typically required between one thousand and one million times as much computation time as the convolution software (depending on the simulation parameters). The results were consistent with the probability calculations within the statistical accuracy of the Monte Carlo results.