A Well-Conditioned Integral-Equation Formulation for Efficient Transient Analysis of Electrically Small Microelectronic Devices

Abstract

A hierarchically regularized coupled set of time-domain surface and volume electric field integral-equations (TD-S-EFIE and TD-V-EFIE) for analyzing electromagnetic wave interactions with electrically small and geometrically intricate composite structures comprising perfect electrically conducting surfaces and finite dielectric volumes is presented. A classically formulated coupled set of TD-S- and V-EFIEs is shown to be ill-conditioned at low frequencies owing to the hypersingular nature of the TD-S-EFIE. To eliminate low-frequency breakdown in marching-on-in-time solvers for these coupled equations, a hierarchical regularizer leveraging generalized Rao-Wilton-Glisson functions is applied to the TD-S-EFIE; no regularization is applied to the TD-V-EFIE as it is protected from low-frequency breakdown by an identity term. The resulting hierarchically regularized hybrid TD-S- and V-EFIE solver is applicable to the analysis of wave interactions with electrically small and densely meshed structures of arbitrary topology. The accuracy, efficiency, and applicability of the proposed solver are demonstrated by analyzing crosstalk in a six-port transmission line, radiation from a miniature radio-frequency identification antenna, and, plane-wave coupling onto a partially-shielded and fully loaded two-layer computer board.