How to Speed Up Large-Scale EM Simulation of ICs Without Compromising Accuracy

With growing on-chip radio frequency (RF) content, electromagnetic (EM) simulation of the passives is critical for a variety of reasons—from selecting the right RF design candidates to detecting parasitic coupling that directly impacts performance. Being on-chip, accurate EM analysis requires a tie into the process technology in the form of process design kits (PDKs) as well as a foundry-certified EM simulation technology. Anything short of that could very well compromise the functionality of the RF integrated circuit (IC). More than 10X faster than other commercial EM tools, the Cadence EMX Planar 3D Solver is the fastest EM simulator for IC design based on fast multipole methods (FMMs) and provides the highest-in-class accuracy because of volume mesh formulation for conductors.