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

‘Virtuoso Meets Maxwell’ is a blog series that explores the Virtuoso RF and MultiTech Solutions. So how does Virtuoso meet Maxwell? This is done by combining the industry leader in custom design, Virtuoso, with powerful EM solvers that address a wide range of design needs. This series features the voices of Cadence experts who share their experience with various tools in the Virtuoso IC Packaging world along with the nuances of RF, microwave, and high frequency designs. Watch 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: Defining Ports in EMX Planar Solver

Paying attention to how you mesh your EM structures is as important as quality port definitions. The density of your mesh will play a big role in the accuracy/performance tradeoff that you make in your EM simulations. The Cadence EMX Planar 3D Solver provides several controls to define mesh density in conductors and vias and, by default, will use techniques like regularity in structures to accelerate the meshing operation. 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 a part of Virtuoso Studio? For this, we provide Virtuoso Studio’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 Studio will appear 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.

 

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

Left-click 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, making 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 – our 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 post, you will 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 be using EMX6.1 or newer versions to display port indexes. If you zoom in on these locations, you will see the details of the ports themselves:

Edge port on the conductor attached to capacitor C0:

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

Once you are satisfied with the structure and placement of your ports, you can turn off their display with the click of an icon. The visibility of the wireframe, structure surface, and orientation axis are also controlled via the default toolbar. All of these features make viewing and refining your mesh a very straightforward task, which will improve the overall quality of your EM model.

Now that you have got 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 features along with the unparalleled performance and accuracy of the EMX solver significantly improve their electromagnetic analysis flow. To learn more, reach out to your local Applications Engineer or register for a free Cloud-based trial of the Virtuoso RF Solution flow using the Free Trials links in the Related Resources section of this blog.

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

Datasheets	Virtuoso RF Solution Virtuoso Heterogeneous Integration
Product Manuals	Virtuoso MultiTech Framework Guide Virtuoso RF Solution Guide Virtuoso Electromagnetic Solver Assistant User Guide
Free Trials	Virtuoso RF Solution - Module Layout with Edit-in-Concert Virtuoso RF Solution - EM Analysis Virtuoso RF Solution - Physical Implementation Flows

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

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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! Subscribe to receive email notifications about our latest Custom IC Design blog posts.