Virtuoso Meets Maxwell: Viewing Your Mesh in EMX Planar 3D Solver

'Virtuoso Meets Maxwell' is a blog series aimed at exploring the capabilities and potential of Virtuoso® RF Solution and Virtuoso MultiTech. So, how does Virtuoso meet Maxwell? Now, Virtuoso platform 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. Watch out for our posts on Mondays.

A few months ago, I wrote about the importance of port definitions in electromagnetic simulation. If you missed that post, you can read it here.

Paying attention to how you mesh your EM structures is as important as quality port definitions. The density of your mesh plays a big role in the accuracy/performance tradeoff that you make in the EM simulations. EMX^® Planar 3D Solver provides several controls to define mesh density in conductors and vias, and by default, uses techniques like regularity in structures to accelerate the meshing operation. And once your mesh is complete, you can view it prior to simulation with a variety of different applications including Paraview and Matlab. But what about a viewer that is native to Virtuoso? For this, we provide Virtuoso’s 3D mesh viewer. Today I’ll be walking you through some of the features of this viewer, and how you can use it to ensure a quality mesh before you launch your EM run.

The 3D mesh viewer in Virtuoso appears automatically after the Generate Mesh command is called from the Open Run icon on the EM Assistant toolbar. You can also invoke it explicitly after a mesh is generated for your design using the View 3D Mesh menu item.

In the example shown below, I have included two inductors and some connected metal routes/vias in my model. I have opted to model the metal as 3D, and have also included capacitive and inductive effects of my vias so that they show up in this model:

You can use the left mouse button to rotate the structure in a 3D fashion, and the scroll wheel to zoom in and out:

Not proficient with navigating around a 3D viewer? We make this easy for you by providing a collection of quick access viewport controls on the Viewer’s toolbar. These will allow you to view the top, bottom, side or corner of the structure, all while preserving the zoomed view that you have:

You can toggle the visibility of your layers using the Layers Assistant on the left side of the canvas, which makes it easy to view structures that might be obscured by other layers:

Need to check for electrical shorts/opens? You can colorize the nets in your model with the Layer Assistant to check your connectivity:

You can also toggle the visibility of the entire structure that is on a given net, using this same interface:

Returning to the subject of the port definitions – the Virtuoso 3D Viewer makes it very easy to visualize port placement and structure, as well as to control the visibility of port index annotations. If you look back to some of the earlier images in this blog, you’ll see the names of the four ports that are included in my model with the text placed at the port location. Note that you must use EMX/INTEGRAND 6.1 or later to display your port indexes. If you zoom in to these locations, you’ll see the details of the ports themselves:

Here is an edge port on the conductor attached to capacitor C0.

And, an internal port associated with the inductor L0’s pcell pin:

And once you are satisfied with the structure and placement of your ports, you can turn off their display with the click of an icon. Visibility of the wireframe, structure surface, and orientation axis are also controlled by using the default toolbar. All of these features make viewing and refining your mesh a very straightforward task, which improves the overall quality of your EM model.

Now that you’d gotten a glimpse of the Virtuoso 3D Viewer, why not take a closer look at the overall Virtuoso RF Solution capability? Our customers regularly report that the usability of features along with the unparalleled performance and accuracy of the EMX solver significantly improves their electromagnetic analysis flow. To learn more, reach out to your local applications engineer, or register for a free Cloud-based trial of the flows in the Virtuoso RF Solution using this link: https://www.cadence.com/en_US/home/tools/custom-ic-analog-rf-design/custom-ic-analog-rf-flows/virtuoso-rf-solution.html#freetrial

Also be sure to check out the Virtuoso RF Solution Product Page:

Virtuoso RF Solution Product Information

Check back regularly for updated blogs and be sure to revisit the Virtuoso Meets Maxwell blog series for those that you may have missed.  

Related Resources

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

Kristin Fullerton

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About Virtuoso Meets Maxwell

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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