Spreading resistance calculations by the use of Gauss-Laguerre quadrature

The Gauss-Laguerre quadrature is proposed as a numerical method for calculating the correction factor integrals that occur in spreading resistance calculations. The method is very efficient in terms of computation time and memory storage, requiring only 33 integrand values for each integral evaluation. The accuracy of the method has been investigated for a variety of graded structures, and found to be better than 5%. As a test of its practical utility, the method has been used in the correction of the spreading resistance profile of a practical buried layer structure, and it has been found that the CPU time taken to correct the entire profile of 57 data points is 1.0 min on an IBM 1130 System with a 16K word (16 bit) memory or 0.4 sec on a UNIVAC 1100/10 Multiprocessor System with a 393K word (36 bit) memory. These times are a factor of 6 to 8 less than those required by using the previously proposed adaptive Simpson's rule to compute the correction factor integrals.