Halide perovskite semiconductors, either fully inorganic or hybrid organic-inorganic, have attracted a lot of interest since 2012 owing to their excellent performances for photovoltaic applications. These low-cost semiconductors have attractive intrinsic physical properties for optoelectronics, including direct band gaps, small effective masses, large carrier mobilities, sizeable optical absorption and quantum yield for luminescence. Available tools, including commercial codes, for semiconductor device simulations provide reasonable descriptions of the perovskite device characteristics under operation. However such simulations are still hardly predictive. The aim of the presentation will be to give an overview of the current challenges for such simulations by comparison to classical semiconductors, including 1) the diversity of compositions, nanostructure dimensionalities, cristallographic structures or processing of the perovskite materials, 2) the unusual physical properties of this new class of soft and ionic semiconductors, 3) the primary importance and complexity of the interfaces in perovskite-based thin film heterostructures.