Today’s warfighters and the equipment they use across all domains of land, sea, air and space are connected like never before. In harsh, mission critical environments, the electronic systems that provide this connectivity must be lightweight, practical, low power, robust and reliable enough to withstand cyber-attacks and challenging physical and electromagnetic environments.
The engineers designing this equipment are forced to balance these competing requirements across a wide range of scales, from:
- Microelectronics to devices
- Devices to their integration on a platform, such as an aircraft
- Platforms to their use in a complex mission
Simulation plays a critical role in helping engineers overcome these complex demands, sustain equipment more effectively and deliver modernization and innovation faster and at lower cost — all to ensure the warfighter stays ahead of the threat.
By bringing together Ansys technology experts and partners, we have created a series of five short webinars that collectively showcase how simulation can be applied to solve these challenges from the microchip to the mission.
These webinars will cover topics as diverse as side channel attack, PCB reliability, installed antenna performance and even the integration of high-fidelity physics-based simulation with digital mission engineering.
Hardware Security and Thermal Reliability for Mission Critical Electronic Design
The strongest threats to modern security hardware come from side-channels attacks, which are hardware-based attacks where the attacker attempts to reveal the state of a cryptographic device and its contents.
Main types of side-channel attacks include:
- Power-noise — variations in power currents cause noise in the power delivery network and the silicon substrate
- Thermal emissions — heat signatures from internal operations
- Electromagnetic emissions — electric and magnetic fields
Learn of ways in which simulation can help make hardware more secure against attack using early RTL analysis of the micro-architecture of chips, quantification of side-channel leakage and security verification.
Improving PCB Performance and Reliability
The traditional test-fail-fix-repeat process of validating electronics accounts for 73% of product development costs. An integrated multiphysics simulation workflow has been shown to reduce design cycle times by 24% and safety test cycles by 36%.
Learn how to accomplished these savings by integrating critical applications — PCB design, EMI/EMC, power and signal integrity, DC thermal, structural integrity, reliability and manufacturing — into a common simulation workflow.
Modeling and Simulation for Installed Performance of Antennas
Antennas are vital communications components. But since they are often designed in isolation or under ideal conditions, they face multiple challenges when operating in the real world, including when:
- Mounting antennas on realistic platforms impacts overall RF system performance
- Antennas couple to other installed antennas, negatively affecting their operation
- The local environment of installed antennas — such as in “urban canyons” produced by tall, dense buildings in a city — can slow or block transmissions
Overcoming these challenges may require high frequency electromagnetic analyses over a dimensional range that spans five or six orders of magnitude. This may include full platforms that extend thousands of electrical wavelengths in size.
From CAD to Co-Site
Simulating an entire aircraft or vehicle platform’s radio frequency interference is daunting because of challenges like:
- Dirty geometry
- Obtaining effective antenna details
- Integrating system-level information from many engineering functions
By combining physics-based solvers with system-level behavioral models, a power flow approach is applied in the most efficient manner, achieving reliable simulation results that balance computational resources. Learn how this enables broadband co-site mitigation by using simulation for very large platforms.
Integrating High-fidelity Physics-based Simulations with Digital Mission Models
Integrating physics-based accuracy throughout the modeling and simulation pyramid ensures the fastest, highest-fidelity assessment of mission-critical technology.
Ascending the pyramid from its base to its apex involves moving through:
- Highly accurate physics-based simulations of components and subsystems
- Component simulation data integrated into system-level models using derived reduced-order models of systems and “systems of systems”
- Mission assessment simulation that leverage the persistent accuracy of physics-based system data
Learn how high-fidelity, physics-based simulations can be integrated with mission simulators and two real-world examples that include a CubeSat thermal analysis and a Ka-band SATCOM antenna.
Or, enjoy all the webinars that showcase the power of simulation from the microchip to the mission.
