3D FEM ANALYSIS
SOFTWARE FOR
SOLVING COMPLEX
PROBLEMS
EXECUTIVE INTERVIEW SERIES
MWJ SPEAKS WITH JOHN DEFORD, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING, AWR.
VISIT
WWW.MWJOURNAL.COM TO READ THIS IN-DEPTH INTERVIEW.
Electromagnetic (EM) analysis software has evolved from its traditional place as a back-end verification tool to a necessity throughout the design flow. However, this
role can impede the design flow if it requires
designers to spend precious time performing
file conversions, transfers, and other minutiae,
or slow it to a crawl when tackling large planar
or arbitrary three-dimensional (3D) problems.
AWR, a company founded by microwave en-
gineers who
have experienced firsthand the complex issues
that are part
and parcel of
high frequency design, has
addressed this
issue with its
AXIEM
3D planar
EM simula-
tor, which can s Fig. 1 SEM photo reveals the arbitrary 3D features of a FET
making the Analyst FEM solver a good fit.
process upwards of a million unknowns at very
high speed. The company has now expanded
these capabilities to include a full 3D finite
element method (FEM) EM analysis with its
Analyst 3D FEM EM acquisition. Analyst
technology is unique among 3D EM tools
because it can efficiently use clusters of computers in parallel employing both spectral and
domain decomposition techniques. Together
these proprietary algorithms produce an or-ders-of-magnitude reduction in computational
time while improving results. The complexity
of the problems Analyst can solve are limited
only by the computational resources available
to the designer and not the abilities of the software itself.
Even relatively straight-forward geometries
presented to a 3D FEM EM solver can contain
many thousands of coupled equations (see
Figure 1). While the solutions to these are necessary, a single computer’s processing time and
AWR CORP.
El Segundo, CA
