Three‐dimensional electromagnetic simulation of electronic circuits of general shape

Abstract

A general purpose CAD tool, the IE3D electromagnetic simulator is presented in this article. The simulator is based on an integral equation, a method-of-moment formulation for a full-wave solution of three-dimensional (3D) arbitrarily shaped structures in microwave and millimeter-wave integrated circuits (MMIC), high temperature superconductor (HTS) circuits, microstrip antennas, RF printed circuit boards (PCB), and high speed digital circuit packaging. The primary solution of the simulator is the current distribution on a metallic structure in an environment of multilayered substrates on infinitely extended ground plane. The circuit parameters of the structure in either S-parameter form or RLC-SPICE equivalent circuit form is extracted from the solved current distribution. The simulator consists of an MS-Windows-based layout editor, a schematic editor, an electromagnetic simulator, and a post processor. The simulator can perform stand-alone electromagnetic simulation and optimization and mixed electromagnetic and nodal analysis. Simulation results for structures in various high frequency and high speed domains are presented and compared to measured results.

Benchmark of full Maxwell 3-dimensional electromagnetic field solvers on prototype cavity-backed aperture antenna

“…IE3D [9]: (Integral Equation 3 Dimensional) It computes matrix elements using a dyadic field formulation and a spatial-domain approach [10]. It can model truely arbitrary 3D metal surfaces.…”

Benchmark of full Maxwell 3D electromagnetic field solvers on an SOIC8 packaged and interconnected circuit

“…Integral equation 3D (IE3D) [12] computes matrix elements using a dyadic field formulation and a spatial-domain approach [13]. With respect to the geometry of the metal surface, it is the most general of the S/BIE solvers, in the sense that the spatial orientation of any surface (with respect to the layer structure) is arbitrary.…”