  The purpose of this article is to present an accurate way, based on a
physical description, to simulate Coulomb blockade devices. The method
underlying the simulations depends only on fundamental parameters of the system
and does not require the use of high level fitting parameters as tunneling
conductances contrary to number of current Coulomb blockade simulators. It lies
mainly on the transfer Hamiltonian formalism and Bardeen's formula within the
framework of effective mass tensor. It can be applied to metallic Coulomb
blockade devices as well as semiconductor ones. The details of this method are
extensively reviewed from a theoretical point of view and the main results are
presented. In particular, we study how to obtain tunneling rates information to
deduce current/voltage characteristics of Metal-Insulator-Metal-Insulator-Metal
(MIMIM) and Metal-Insulator-Si Quantum Dot-Insulator-Metal (MISiIM) structures.
