Introducing Cadence Fidelity CFD Software

On 19 Apr 2022 we announced Fidelity CFD. As you can imagine, it has dominated my thinking for the past year. To explain Fidelity, here's my conversation with one of the many voices in my head.

What is Fidelity?

fi·del·i·ty, noun, faithfulness to a person, cause, or belief, demonstrated by continuing loyalty and support.

In early 2021, Cadence entered the market in a big way with the acquisitions of Numeca and Pointwise. Those two organizations have decades of history in the CFD market, serving customers across a broad range of market segments. Together within Cadence, we remain faithful to the cause of delivering and supporting CFD software that helps our customers innovate.

One should not infer that fidelity is new to Cadence. We are industry leaders in electronics design through our expertise in computational software including electrothermal simulation for electronics cooling which necessarily includes CFD. Our industry leading customers rely on us for the design of chips and boards and related gizmos.

People know what the word Fidelity means. What's it really about?

A new era of multiphysics simulation, marked by Cadence's expansion beyond EDA, needs a cool name, don't you agree?

"F" for fluids and fidelity for our commitment to CFD's impact on the design of systems. (A "system" is how the electronics folks refer to the thing into which the electronics are installed. If chips and boards are small things, systems are big things - big things that fly, float, roll, or spin.)

This goes back to our Intelligent System Design strategy. It seems clear to me that the intelligence in modern systems - self-driving cars, UAVs - comes from the electronics. And intelligence doesn't just apply to the system. Making the design process intelligent includes providing a broad, integrated simulation capability.

Why again is an EDA company getting into CFD?

Simply put, electronics get hot and must be cooled and you blow air over them hence fluid dynamics and CFD. See our Celsius product. 

Once you're invested in CFD for electronics cooling you realize just how many other applications can benefit from a fluids simulation capability. After all, our customers designing chips and boards are often doing so to include them in planes, trains, and automobiles - systems that need to be optimized for operating in a fluid environment.

Let's try this again - what is Fidelity? No fancy spin this time.

Fidelity is the unification of our CFD assets into one family. 

Today's Fidelity includes the first integrations of mesh generation capability from the Pointwise software into the meshing capabilities in the Fidelity meshers. Given that both Pointwise and Numeca brought considerable meshing expertise to this enterprise, the combination will be powerful (in the "1+1=3 for sufficiently large values of 1" way). In general, a comprehensive integration of simulation capabilities could deliver a lot of value.

Each software component and capability within Fidelity continues to advance along its own technology vector. For example, the T-Rex meshing technique in Pointwise is now faster, up to 3X faster on some cases.

OK, is that all?

Nope. I'm not a good marketer and buried the lede.

Included in the Fidelity family is our next-generation flow solver based on high-order numerics, scale-resolving turbulence simulations, and massive CPU and GPU acceleration. Given that accurate simulation of the turbulent motion of a fluid is perhaps the most vexing challenge in CFD today (mesh generation exists to make turbulence modeling seem respectable by comparison), Fidelity's scale-resolving techniques like large eddy simulation (LES) promise to provide new insights into the flow leading to the ability to reduce drag, quiet noise, increase mixing, and more. Coupled with high-order numerics to make the computations more efficient and powered by CPU and GPU acceleration, the Fidelity High-Order flow solver truly is next generation.

Can I trust you?

Don't trust me. My colleague Dr. Charles Hirsch is a genuine smart person. Hear what he has to say about Fidelity CFD.

What's next?

We will be releasing the Fidelity software products over the next several weeks. You can expect to see announcements here and on social media when they're available for current customers.

Those of you who are interested in experiencing for the first time how Fidelity CFD can elevate your simulation capabilities should contact us to learn more.