UWEE Tech Report Series

Coupled Electromagnetic-Circuit Simulation of Arbitrarily-Shaped Conducting Structures using Triangular Meshes


UWEETR-2001-0010

Author(s):
Vikram Jandhyala, Yong Wang, Dipanjan Gope, and Richard Shi

Keywords:
Electromagnetics, Computational Electromagnetics, Signal Integrity, Method of Moments, PEEC, Coupled Solution, Iterative Solvers

Abstract

The Partial-Element-Equivalent-Circuit (PEEC) approach is an effective method to convert three-dimensional on-chip multi-conductor structures to circuit-level descriptions. In this paper, a triangular- mesh-based PEEC approach is described, wherein the surfaces of arbitrarily-shaped conducting structures are represented by triangular mesh tesselations. A coupled EM-circuit formulation is obtained through the separation of the scalar, vector, and ohmic potential interactions between pairs of triangular edges-based basis functions. The overall approach can be interpreted as a SPICE-free, surface-only version of PEEC method and is especially useful for on- chip signal integrity analysis of systems-on-chip layout where components with irregular shapes are common.

Download the PDF version