EDA Focus: April 2009

Earlier this month Sonnet Software, announced the availability of the SONNET® Suites Professional™ Release 12 to customers. Sonnet is a leading provider of High Frequency Electromagnetic (EM) Simulation software for 3D planar structures since 1983.

Sonnet uses the Method of Moments applied directly to Maxwell’s Equations to solve planar problems. Sonnet’s implementation of the Method of Moments: first subdivides, or meshes, the metal of a circuit into small subsections. It then takes one of these subsections and, ignoring all other subsections, calculates the voltage everywhere due to current on that one subsection. Sonnet repeats this process for each subsection in turn. Then Sonnet places current on all subsections simultaneously and adjusts those currents such that the total voltage (due to current on all subsections) is zero everywhere that there is conductor. You can not have a voltage across a conductor. This is called a “boundary condition”. The current that gives us zero voltage across all conductors is the solution to the problem (see below for a modification to this when loss is included).

Sonnet Suites is best suited to design challenges involving predominantly planar (3D planar) circuits and antennas. 3D planar circuits consist of layers of metal traces embedded in stratified dielectric material. These circuits may also include vias and vertical metal sheets (z-directed strips). Sonnet Pro allows any number of of dielectric/metal layers including multiple user defined metal types and dielectric materials. Some examples of 3D planar circuits include MMIC, RFIC, coplanar waveguide (CPW) , LTCC, PCB (single and multiple layers) and patch antennas

Two new versions of Sonnet’s EM analysis engine, em™ are introduced in Release 12. The Sonnet Desktop Solver engine is aimed at typical engineering desktop PCs, and utilizes 2 cores in parallel for analysis time reduction. The Sonnet High Performance Solver engine is aimed at high-end workstations with dual quad-core CPUs, and uses up to 8 cores for 8-way parallel processing on a single frequency. Combined with an improved meshing algorithm, the new Sonnet analysis engines provide analyses as much as 30x faster than the previous release. For a summary of the new features in the Sonnet Suites Release 12, please visit: New Features

All Sonnet customers with current software maintenance agreements may download, install and license this powerful new release for the Sonnet Professional Suite, Level3 Gold, Level2 Silver or Level2 Basic Suite. The software is available by download from Sonnet’s web site, and customers are invited to contact their Sonnet Technical Sales Representative for details for accessing the release download.