Automatic Adaptive Meshing

A key benefit of ANSYS Q3D Extractor software is its automatic adaptive meshing techniques. Engineers are required to specify only geometry, material properties and the desired output. The meshing process uses a highly robust volumetric meshing technique and includes a multithreading capability that reduces the amount of memory used and speeds the simulation time. This proven technology eliminates the complexity of building and refining a finite element mesh and makes advanced numerical analysis practical for all levels of your organization.

3-D Quasi-Static Field Solvers

ANSYS Q3D Extractor contains an advanced quasi-static 3-D electromagnetic field solver based on the method of moments (MoM) and accelerated by the fast multipole method (FMM). The results provided by this solver include proximity and skin effect, dielectric and ohmic loss, and frequency dependencies. Q3D Extractor easily and quickly provides 3-D extraction of resistance (R), partial inductance (L), capacitance (C) and conductance (G).

2-D Transmission Line Solver

ANSYS Q3D Extractor includes a quasi-static 2-D electromagnetic field solver that uses the finite element method (FEM) to determine the per-unit-length RLCG parameters for transmission lines, characteristic impedance (Z0) matrices, propagation speed, delay, attenuation, effective permittivity, differential and common-mode parameters and near- and far-end crosstalk coefficients.

Signal- and Power-Integrity Analysis

The ability to generate highly accurate reduced-order models for use in a circuit simulation makes ANSYS Q3D Extractor the ideal software to perform signal- and power-integrity analyses. Engineers can study crosstalk, ground bounce, interconnect delays and ringing; this helps them to understand the performance of high-speed electronic designs, such as multilayer printed circuit boards, advanced electronic packages and 3-D on-chip passive components. In addition, Q3D Extractor is essential for extracting accurate electrical parasitics of critical interconnect components in the package (bondwires) or on the board (critical nets) and for the connection path between the chip, package and board (i.e., connectors, cables, sockets and transmission lines). By leveraging Q3D Extractor's dynamic links to ANSYS Designer, engineers benefit from an advanced design flow to easily investigate the effects that electrical parasitics have on circuit performance.

Power Electronic Design

ANSYS Q3D Extractor is ideal for the design of power electronic equipment used in hybrid-electric technologies and power distribution applications to optimize inverter architectures and minimize bus inductance, overvoltages and short circuit currents. Q3D Extractor can extract resistance, partial inductance and capacitance parasitics from high-power bus bars, cables and high-power inverter/converter packages and input them into ANSYS Simplorer to study the EMI/EMC performance of a power system. Links to ANSYS Mechanical structural mechanics software deliver the ability to study mechanical and thermal stresses caused by electrical currents.

Dynamic links to ANSYS Simplorer are ideal for predicting signal- and power-integrity performance. Designers can easily investigate the effects that electrical parasitics have on circuit performance.

Touch Screen Design

ANSYS Q3D Extractor users solve design challenges by analyzing the RLCG matrix data of touch-screen devices. The addition of efficiently solving thin conductive layers, such as ITO, can provide speedup of up to 22 times the traditional thick metal solution.

Equivalent Circuit Model Creation

ANSYS Q3D Extractor can be used to create equivalent circuit models (SPICE sub-circuits/ladder-type lumped models). The type of model produced by Q3D Extractor depends on which solver was used. The 2-D solver creates ANSYS Simplorer sml, Berkeley Spice, Cadence DML, HSPICE, HSPICE W Element (tabular frequency dependent), PSpice, Spectre, Intel LCF, IBIS ICM and Apache CPP models. The 3-D solver creates ANSYS Simplorer sml, Berkeley Spice, Cadence DML, HSPICE, IBIS Package Model, Maxwell Spice, PSpice, Spectre and IBIS ICM models.

Optimization & Statistical Analysis

ANSYS Optimetrics is a versatile, optional software program that adds parametric, optimization, sensitivity and statistical analysis capabilities to ANSYS electromagnetic field simulation software products. Optimetrics automates the design optimization process for high-performance electronic devices by quickly identifying optimal values for design parameters that satisfy user-specified constraints.

Features

High-Performance Computing

ANSYS SIwave includes high-performance computing (HPC) options that allow the solver to use multiple threads, cores and processors to solve large simulations. This parallelization helps to enable full-packages-merged-to-board solutions for signal integrity, power integrity and electromagnetic interference.

HPC options includes a unique feature called the 3-D domain decomposition method (DDM). When invoked, SIwave with 3-D DDM solves 3-D discontinuities with a rigorous 3-D field solver and then combines all domains back together for the full solution. This method retains much of the traditional hybrid method’s speed while providing full accuracy for regions in the model with complex 3-D discontinuities.

In addition, HPC invokes the spectral decomposition method (SDM) for SIwave’s Sentinel-PSI SYZ solver. This capability significantly speeds up Sentinel-PSI by distributing frequency points over compute cores, whether they exist in an IT-managed cluster or single computer.

CAD & Layout Tool Integration

Using AnsoftLinks for MCAD or ANSYS Workbench, ANSYS Q3D Extractor can import 3-D geometry from mechanical CAD (MCAD) including IGES, STEP, ACIS, Parasolid, NASTRAN, Pro/ENGINEER, AutoCAD, CATIA and Siemens NX. Q3D Extractor can bidirectionally share geometry, geometry parameters and material properties with other ANSYS solvers. This powerful functionality enables engineers to easily perform multiphysics simulations.

With the addition of ALinks for ECAD, Q3D Extractor is tightly integrated with layout design tools from Cadence, Mentor Graphics, Synopsys, Altium and Zuken.

ANSYS Workbench Integration

Integration with ANSYS Workbench enables DC power loss calculated by ANSYS Q3D Extractor to be used as a source for thermal analysis performed by the ANSYS solvers. This is particularly useful for DC power connectors and DC bus bars. Statistical yield analysis and design of experiment studies for six sigma analysis can be done using ANSYS DesignXplorer.