3-DIMENSIONAL ELECTROMAGNETIC SIMULATION OF ELECTRONIC-CIRCUITS OF GENERAL SHAPE

A general purpose CAD tool, the IE3D electromagnetic simulator is pres ented in this article. The simulator is based on an integral equation, a method-of-moment formulation for a full-wave solution of three-dime nsional (3D) arbitrarily shaped structures in microwave and millimeter -wave integrated circuits (MMIC), high temperature superconductor (HTS ) circuits, microstrip antennas, RF printed circuit boards (PCB), and high speed digital circuit packaging. The primary solution of the simu lator is the current distribution on a metallic structure in an enviro nment of multilayered substrates on infinitely extended ground plane. The circuit parameters of the structure in either S-parameter form or RLC-SPICE equivalent circuit form is extracted from the solved current distribution. The simulator consists of an MS-Windows-based layout ed itor, a schematic editor, an electromagnetic simulator, and a post pro cessor. The simulator can perform stand-alone electromagnetic simulati on and optimization and mixed electromagnetic and nodal analysis. Simu lation results for structures in various high frequency and high speed domains are presented and compared to measured results. (C) 1994 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.