Asymptotic Stability of a Stationary Solution to a Thermal Hydrodynamic Model for Semiconductors

The present paper concerns the existence and the asymptotic stability of a stationary solution to the initial boundary value problem for a one-dimensional heat-conductive hydrodynamic model for semiconductors. It is important to analyze thermal influence on the motion of electrons in semiconductor device to improve the reliability of devices by handling a hot carrier problem. We show the unique existence of the stationary solution satisfying a subsonic condition by using the Leray-Schauder and the Schauder fixed-point theorems. Then the asymptotic stability of the stationary solution is proved by deriving the a priori estimate uniformly in time. Here an energy form plays an essential role. We also prove that the solution converges to the stationary solution exponentially fast as time tends to infinity.