ANSYS HFSS is the industry standard tool when it comes to 3D full-wave electromagnetic field analysis. Typical uses include any RF passive devices on a wide frequency range.
The environment is easy to learn and supports the whole spectrum of the analysis starting with the post-processing by using a powerful ACIS Kernel driven Modeller. The engineer will be able to solve the model with the most suitable solver for his particular problem. That will guarantee highly accurate results within a minimum solution time.
- Devices
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HFSS allows you to evaluate the characteristic behaviour of the following devices:
- Antennas/Mobile Communications including: Patches, Dipoles, Horns, Conformal Cell Phone Antennas, Wire antennas, Absorption Rate (SAR), Infinite Arrays, Radar Cross Section (RCS), Frequency Selective Surfaces (FSS)
- Waveguide including: Filters, Resonators, Transitions, Couplers
- Filters including: Cavity Filters, Microstrip, Dielectric
- Package Modeling including: BGA, QFP, Flip-Chip
- EMC/EMI including: Shield Enclosures, Coupling, Near- or Far-Field Radiation
- PCB Board Modeling including: Power/Ground planes, Mesh Grid Grounds, Backplanes
- Silicon/Gas including: Spiral Inductors, Transformers
- Connectors including: Coax, SFP/XFP, Backplane, Transitions
- Benefits of HFSS
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The Finite Element Method allows the user much better than other Methods to model any arbitrary shaped 3D structure. The HFSS tetrahedron mesh represents accurately even curved surfaces and highly detailed models. By using an adaptive meshing process the results may be obtained to user-specified accuracy with no engineering effort or manual intervention with the mesh process. This is particularly important because the engineer does not have to be familiar with the process of creating a mesh and does not need to put a higher amount of effort into the mesh creation. This process has repeatedly proven to be of significantly greater accuracy than non-adaptive solution processes and saves a tremendous amount of engineering time.
Another advantage is that the user can model a wide range of material characteristics. It is no problem to select an anisotropic material or using temperature dependent characteristics. A number of frequency dependent material models are available.
- HPC and HFSS
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High Performance Computing (HPC)
Learn more on how to increase efficiency by solving more models in less time and see how to increase the capacity by solving much larger models than before. ANSYS provides different licensing schemes enabling the access to the following two main technologies.
Solving really large models with HFSS HPC and the Domain Decomposition Method (DDM)
Domain Decomposition is a solver introduced in ANSYS HFSS v.12 which complement and enhance existing HPC technologies like Multi Processing and Distributed Solve Option. This new solver allows you to access the memory and cores of available machines across your network. A master node will devide the entire domain into sub domains which are then solved in parallel on different machines. This process is fully automated and easy to use. DDM can solve much larger models than before.
Enhance your productivity with Multiprocessing Option (MPO) and the Distributed Solve Option (DSO)
Both options are features of the HPC licensing as well. Multi-Processing is a shared memory technique which enables the user to involve more cores to solve his problem much faster. The Distributed Solve Option (DSO) allows the user to distribute a frequency sweeps or solving a number of model variations across different nodes or cores in parallel across the network. DSO will speed-up your simulation time and increase the throughput for individual simulations by using available resources across the network.
- HFSS for Electromagnetic Simulations
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Benefits of using ANSOFT HFSS for Electromagnetic Simulations
by Marco Antoniades
My primary use of the ANSOFT HFSS software is to design and simulate electrically small antennas.
The 3D capabilities of HFSS make it an ideal candidate for this purpose, since all of the fine geometrical and electrical details of the antennas can be included in the solver.
Additionally, HFSS allows the user to specify target areas that require a more dense mesh, thus effectively providing more accurate solutions with shorter simulation times.
From my prior experience, this leads to a very accurate reproduction of the simulated performance in the experimental testing, thus avoiding costly re-makes of the fabricated prototypes. Furthermore, the ability to visualize the different field quantities within the solved designs, in conjunction with the HFSS fields calculator, greatly assists in the initial design of antennas.
My anecdotal experience from colleagues within the electromagnetics community is that the HFSS software is widely used in academia and industry to simulate antenna designs because of its reliability and robustness. This is evidenced by many presentations at international conferences in which HFSS is used in the design and validation of antenna designs.
Some recent examples of my own work published in IEEE journal papers, in which I modelled and simulated antenna structures in HFSS and compared their performance to the one obtained experimentally are listed below. In each case, HFSS has been mentioned explicitly in the text as the preferred simulation software for these structures.
M.A. Antoniades and G.V. Eleftheriades, “A multiband monopole antenna with an embedded reactance-cancelling transmission-line matching network,” IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters, vol. 9, pp. 1107-1110, Nov. 2010.
J. Zhu, M.A. Antoniades and G.V. Eleftheriades, “A compact tri-band monopole antenna with single-cell metamaterial loading,” IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, vol. 58, no. 4, pp.1031-1038, Apr. 2010.
M.A. Antoniades and G.V. Eleftheriades, “A broadband dual-mode monopole antenna using NRITL metamaterial loading,” IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters, vol. 8, pp. 258-261, Feb. 2009.
M.A. Antoniades and G.V. Eleftheriades, “A compact multi-band monopole antenna with a defected ground plane,” IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters, vol. 7, pp. 652-655, Oct. 2008.
M.A. Antoniades and G.V. Eleftheriades, “A folded-monopole model for electrically small NRI-TL metamaterial antennas,” IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters, vol. 7, pp. 425-428, Oct. 2008.