Agilent Technologies Inc. announced the release of Electromagnetic Professional 2011.07, an electromagnetic modeling and simulation platform that creates 3-D models and analyzes the electrical performance of packages, connectors, antennas and other RF components.

Known as EMPro, the platform is tightly integrated with Agilent's Advanced Design System software for the design of RF and high speed integrated circuits, modules and PC boards. The release features significant new capabilities and improved speed for modeling RF and high speed components.

EMPro 2011.07 delivers a new Eigenmode solver, which quickly finds the resonant frequencies for cavity filters, a common high frequency component used in wireless communication systems. Filter designers can also visualize the resulting electromagnetic fields at each resonant frequency and make adjustments to the cavity structure to optimize filter performance.

EMPro 2011.07 also provides faster simulations with existing solvers. The Finite Element Method simulator in EMPro 2011.07 features CPU multithreading enhancements to the iterative solver, resulting in a 2x speed improvement on computers with quad-core CPUs. The EmPro 2011.07 Finite Difference Time Domain simulator offers GPU acceleration enhancements resulting in a 6x speed improvement on models with curved or non-orthogonal surfaces, when using computers with CUDA-based GPU cards from NVIDIA.

As an added benefit, PC board designs can now be directly imported from Cadence Allegro to EMPro 2011.07, where various signal integrity and EMI analyses can be performed. Additionally, EMPro 2011.07 incorporates several new features that improve ease of use and design efficiency. For example, new toolbars and hotkeys make it easier and faster to perform common operations. New cutplanes allow the user to view internal details of complex structures and easily snap to internal objects. Animated electromagnetic field visualization enhancements provide improved design insight.