W2405EP Keysight FDTD Simulator Element

The W2405EP Keysight FDTD Simulation Element is Electromagnetic Professional's (EMPro's) simulation engine based on the Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) modeling technique.

FDTD 3D EM simulation technology is an alternative to the frequency domain-based Finite Element Method (FEM). Because of its simple, robust nature and its ability to incorporate a broad range of nonlinear materials and devices, FDTD is useful for a wide range of applications such as antenna design, microwave circuits, bio/EM effects, EMC/EMI problems and photonics.

Compared to FEM, FDTD is better suited for structures that are large compared to the wavelength of interest. Examples are antenna simulations that include the entire mobile phone and human body, and channel/backplane simulations for signal integrity applications. For more information on the relative strengths of FEM and FDTD technologies, please refer to State of the Art in EM Software for Microwave Engineers.

The W2405 Keysight FDTD Simulator Element provides the ability to run FDTD simulations from the EMPro 3D EM Platform (note that the W2401 EMPro Core Environment is required).

Starting with EMPro 2010, the W2405 FDTD Simulation Element includes standard GPU acceleration capability. With this capability the FDTD solver can run on an NVIDIA CUDA-based GPU that has hundreds of cores, which results in much faster simulations compared to a CPU that may only have a few cores. Note that larger FDTD problems require considerable memory, and in these cases large amounts of RAM are required on-board the GPU cards (only GPU RAM, not CPU RAM is available during GPU-accelerated FDTD simulations).

EMPro supports CUDA-based GPU hardware from NVIDIA
(see http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_gpus.html for a complete list).

NVIDIA GPU card drivers are available at http://www.nvidia.com/page/pg_20030521269172.html

The W2408 FDTD GT Acceleration Element option is still available to provide more advanced GPU acceleration features, which support designs that include dispersive materials.

Options:

• Perform regulatory compliance tests such as hearing-aid compatibility (HAC) and specific absorption rate (SAR) by adding the W2406EP Compliance Element.
• Increase FDTD simulation speed and capacity with advanced acceleration from our partner, Acceleware, utilizing graphical processor unit (GPU) hardware, with the W2408EP FDTD GT Acceleration Element.

Explore our EM Applications Center.