Virtuoso Meets Maxwell: Add Some MAGic to Your ElectroMAGnetic Analysis

9 Sep 2019 • 4 minute read

'Virtuoso Meets Maxwell' is a blog series aimed at exploring the capabilities and potential of Virtuoso RF and Virtuoso MultiTech. So, how does Virtuoso meet Maxwell? Now, Virtuoso supports RF designs, and the RF designers measure the physical and radiation effects by using the Maxwell's equations. In addition to providing insights into the useful software enhancements, this series broadcasts the voices of different bloggers and experts about their knowledge and experience of various tools in the Virtuoso IC-Packaging world along with the nuances of RF, microwave, and high frequency designs. We are posting on Mondays.

If you’ve ever seen a great magician at work, you know that their talent lies in making the impossible look easy. That’s what we have done with electromagnetic (EM) analysis in the Virtuoso^® RF Solution. For anyone who has struggled with cumbersome EM integration in the past, this blog post is for you.

The EM Analysis flow in the Virtuoso RF Solution provides access to a selection of engines, with a degree of integration that makes previously tedious tasks very straightforward. With the Virtuoso RF Solution, you have an assistant-driven EM flow that guides you through the process of defining structures to simulate, creating ports, simplifying metal fill, running the simulation, and analyzing/debugging results. Let’s look at each of these in more detail.

Selecting Structures for EM Simulation

This is as simple as selecting instances and/or wires in your layout, either directly or via the Navigator Assistant, and pressing a button. There’s no need to create copies of your layout or to manually extract shapes before sending items to the solver. The Virtuoso RF Solution does this all for you.

Port Creation

The Virtuoso RF Solution provides an automated way to create ports for EM simulation. What has traditionally been a manual and often error-prone process can be done for multiple components in a single step. Visualization of the ports is provided via cross-probing from the EM assistant, and you can manually override the port definitions, if needed.

Shape Simplification

Metal fill is often a mandatory step to ensure manufacturability and high yield. But this additional data is not desirable in EM simulations since it greatly increases the number of unknowns that need to be solved. With the Virtuoso RF Solution’s shape pre-processing, you can remove dangling shapes, as well as merge, stripe, and smooth shapes in areas where the data is not expected to impact results. Users can protect shapes from simplification and preview the impact of their simplification instructions. The layout itself is never changed; the Virtuoso RF Solution will make the changes in memory as it sends the structures to the solver.

Running the Simulation

As a designer you have access to both AXIEM, a Method of Moments solver, as well as the Clarity 3D Solver, which uses Finite Element Methods. This ensures that you always have the right tool for the job. The EM Assistant provides access to the most commonly used simulation parameters, as well as controls to launch and monitor your simulation. You can preview the mesh created by the EM solver to verify what is sent to the engine.

Extracted View Creation

Incorporating the EM results into your electrical simulation is completely automated. All you need to do is specify the name of the destination view, and the Virtuoso RF Solution does the rest. The ideal devices/wires are replaced by nport elements with connectivity maintained. These nports are even automatically configured to point to the S-parameter file that your EM simulation generated. The only remaining step is to direct Virtuoso ADE Explorer or Assembler to use the view in your circuit simulation. It’s that easy.

Not only does this flow provide much faster turnaround times than the EM flows that you’ve used in the past, but it also empowers you to easily run EM simulations rather than relying on your local EM expert. And if you are that EM expert, we’ve just made your job a whole lot easier.

If you’d like to try EM simulation in the Virtuoso RF Solution, I highly recommend the Rapid Adoption Kit (RAK) listed below. Seeing is believing!

Related Resources

For more information on Cadence circuit design products and services, visit www.cadence.com.

About Virtuoso Meets Maxwell

The Virtuoso Meets Maxwell series includes posts about the next-generation die, package, and board design flow with a focus on reinventing and optimizing the design process to ensure that the designer remains a designer! Keep watching!

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Kristin Fullerton