A new multilevel Green's function interpolation method for large-scale low-frequency EM simulations

Abstract

In this paper, a new multilevel Green's function interpolation method (MLGFIM) is presented to solve integral equations for large-scale electrostatic problems. In MLGFIM, the problem domain is first divided into multilevel cubes. Next, the peer-level Green's function interpolation technique is employed, and then, a new lower-to-upper-level Green's function interpolation technique is devised. They are used with the multilevel discretization to speed up the matrix-vector multiplications in the iterative solution in which a computational complexity of O(N) is achieved. The MLGFIM is used to extract the capacitances encountered in radio frequency integrated circuits (RFICs) and microelectromechanical systems. Moreover, to demonstrate its efficiency both in simulation speed and memory storage requirement, MLGFIM is compared with FastCap for free space problems and applied to extract capacitances from multilayered structures. For problems with 375,000 unknowns, the proposed method only requires 343 MB of computer memory.