Coupled electromagnetic-circuit simulation of arbitrarily-shaped conducting structures using triangular meshes

Abstract

The partial-element-equivalent-circuit (PEEC) approach is an effective method to convert three-dimensional on-chip multiconductor structures to circuit-level descriptions. In this paper, a triangular-mesh-based PEEC approach is described, wherein the surfaces of arbitrarily-shaped conducting structures are represented by triangular mesh tesselations. A coupled EM-circuit formulation is obtained through the separation of the scalar, vector, and ohmic potential interactions between pairs of triangular edges-based basis functions. The overall approach can be interpreted as a SPICE-free, surface-only version of PEEC method and is especially useful for on-chip signal integrity analysis of systems-on-chip layout where components with irregular shapes are common.