A Hybrid Implicit–Explicit and Conformal (HIE/C) FDTD Method for Efficient Electromagnetic Simulation of Nonorthogonally Aligned Thin Structures

In a conventional finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method, the computational cost increases as a grid spacing decreases because the number of unknowns increases and a time step size decreases to fulfill a numerical stability condition. Especially, it is inherently time-consuming to analyze thin structures such as a printed circuit board (PCB) and nonorthogonally aligned objects such as interconnection patterns on the PCB. In this paper, we propose an efficient electromagnetic simulation technique which is constructed by combining a hybrid implicit-explicit (HIE)-FDTD method and a conformal FDTD (CFDTD) method. The proposed technique can avoid the aforementioned problems by exploiting advantages of the HIE-FDTD and CFDTD methods. An example model of the interconnection pattern on the PCB is analyzed by the proposed and conventional methods, and we compare their accuracy and efficiency.