μWaveRiders: Cadence AWR EM Simulators Solve Complex RF/Microwave Structures for Design Success

15 Dec 2020 • 3 minute read

The Team RF "μWaveRiders" blog series debuts as a showcase for Cadence AWR RF products. Monthly topics will vary between Cadence AWR Design Environment release highlights, feature videos, Cadence Academic Network news (now includes the former AWR University Program), as well as software tips, tricks, customization, and feature spotlights. To receive notifications about new blogs in this series, click Subscribe Now and submit your email ID in the Subscriptions box.

Simulation offers the greatest opportunity to shorten your design time and improve manufacturability and quality. RF designers increasingly rely on electromagnetic (EM) simulations to characterize board designs before the first component is placed, and continue to use EM analysis right through manufacturing handoff. New capabilities in automation and EM analysis are critical as board designs become denser and new manufacturing processes allow you to squeeze more performance out of PCB designs.

A known limitation of EM simulators is that simulation time grows exponentially with the size of the problem. With each new release of AWR Design Environment software, the AWR AXIEM 3D planar and AWR Analyst 3D finite-element method (FEM) EM simulators meet this challenge by offering faster performance that shortens the time for simulation and problem resolution alike.

AWR Design Environment software, including both the AWR AXIEM and AWR Analyst EM simulators, provides you with greatly improved performance and accurate results in support of increasingly complex structures.

AWR AXIEM 3D Planar EM Simulator

AWR AXIEM EM simulation is based on the method-of-moments (MoM) technology. Improvements to key features in the latest release include:

A true DC solver has been added for biasing, resulting in a 40x faster savings in time and memory usage and improved convergence at DC over previous low-frequency solvers.
Green’s function improvements for better modeling of loss boundary conditions on the top and bottom enclosure, and improved modeling of very thin layers.
Sub-nanometer z-axis resolution of metals and dielectrics for better modeling of MIM capacitors.
Major improvements in sensing and correcting ill-formed layout data that's unable to be meshed. The high-aspect ratio facets (HARF) healer eliminates simulation errors without the usual time-intensive intervention, allowing your simulation to continue. The HARF healer delivers faster run times and the ability to solve larger problems.

HARF healer

AWR Analyst 3D FEM EM Simulator

AWR Analyst EM simulation is based on FEM. Improvements to key features in the latest release include:

You can add lumped RLC circuit elements directly to AWR Analyst arbitrary 3D EM structures in lieu of ports. These are implemented as an enforced frequency-dependent impedance between two points, where the RLC components can be configured in either parallel or series.
Improved adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) memory estimates in driven-frequency simulations, allowing efficient use of parallel resources.
Faster solving, most noticeably for large point count simulations. Fast frequency sweeps also make better use of parallel resources.
Improved accuracy for lossy metal wave ports.
You can now run AWR Analyst simulations from the AWR Design Environment Job Scheduler on a remote Linux cluster. The hierarchical matrix LU (HMLU) solver allows you to use multiple nodes on the cluster, breaking up a large matrix for a single frequency and accessing the total combined memory of multiple machines to solve.

Hierarchical Matrix LU Solver

To learn more about AWR AXIEM and Analyst EM simulator enhancements, view the five-minute New EM Features video on the Cadence YouTube Knowledge and Learning subchannel.

For more information on Cadence AWR products, open the Cadence website.

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