What’s New in EMPro 2011.04?

Note: EMPro 2011.04 provides the same features and capabilities as EMPro 2011.02. The only difference between these two releases is a licensing improvement designed to help select customers. The new features and capabilities listed below were first introduced in EMPro 2011.02

EMPro 2011.04 delivers significant advances in performance, accuracy and efficiency. This release includes enhancements to the FDTD simulator, FEM simulator and the 3D Modeling Environment. If you are new to EMPro, take a look at the Electromagnetic Professional (EMPro) main page.

FDTD Simulation Technology

• Conformal meshing – Traditional FDTD meshing uses rectangular cells. New FDTD Conformal Meshing is able to more accurately model curved surfaces and diagonal edges. This results in fewer mesh cells for non-orthogonal geometries, which means faster simulations and reduced memory requirements for a given level of accuracy. Note that a future release of this capability will add support for GPU acceleration of conformal meshed objects, leading to even more speed improvements.

FEM Simulation Technology

• Broadband mesh refinement – The standard meshing process adaptively refines the mesh at the highest frequency of interest. However, designs that have resonances at lower frequencies may also require a refined mesh at those frequencies to ensure accurate results. In EMPro 2011.04, you can now refine the mesh at multiple frequencies, either automatically, or with user-selected frequencies.

30 GHz Coax Patch Antenna

Using broadband refinement, the resonance at 30 GHz is more accurately modeled compared to using a mesh refined only at 40 GHz.

• Advanced meshing control – Users can now specify more precise initial mesh settings. Accuracy and convergence speed are improved by creating a more refined initial mesh near vertices, and near conductor edges and surfaces.

• Multi-threaded far field calculations – following an FEM simulation, the post-processing calculations for determining the far-field values are now significantly faster on multi-core CPU computers.
• Djordjevic dielectric loss modeling – this new material property is now available for FEM simulations. As one of the broadly accepted dielectric loss models, the Djordjevic model ensures causality by accurately modeling complex permittivity as a function of frequency.

3D Modeling Environment

• 3D building blocks – several new shapes, including solderballs and equation-based objects, are now available. All of the building blocks are now more easily accessible, can be directly modified in the project tree, and can be parameterized like other objects.

• Extrude and revolve faces of existing objects – now more easily expand existing shapes and create complex new shapes by applying the extrude and revolve commands to faces of an existing object.

EMPro Platform Support

EMPro 2011.04 is supported on the following platforms:

• Microsoft Windows 7, Vista, XP
• Redhat RHEL WS 4
• Novell SUSE SLES 10

Looking for another version? View other EMPro Product Versions.