High-Performance Conformal FDTD Techniques

A host of electromagnetic simulation tools are available today for modeling electromagnetic systems such as microwave circuits, antenna and associated feeds, electronic devices prone to electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) or electromagnetic interference (EMI) problems, and digital and RF packages. A number of different numerical techniques are used in computational electromagnetics (CEM) solvers, each of which has its own strong suit, as well as limitations. The solvers include the finite element method (FEM) [1], method of moments (MoM) [2], [3], transmission-line modeling (TLM) method [4]–[6], finite integration technique (FIT) [7], and finite difference time domain (FDTD) [8], [9] method. Among these, the finite difference method offers an important advantage over some of the other techniques because it is not only flexible as well as general-purpose in its scope of applications, but it is highly parallelizable as well. In this work, we describe a general-purpose electromagnetic simulation technique [10], which is based on the parallel conformal FDTD method, and we illustrate its engineering applications to the simulation of microwave devices and components.