A parallel FFT accelerated transient field-circuit simulator

Abstract

A novel fast electromagnetic field-circuit simulator that permits the full-wave modeling of transients in nonlinear microwave circuits is proposed. This time-domain simulator is composed of two components: 1) a full-wave solver that models interactions of electromagnetic fields with conducting surfaces and finite dielectric volumes by solving time-domain surface and volume electric field integral equations, respectively, and 2) a circuit solver that models field interactions with lumped circuits, which are potentially active and nonlinear, by solving Kirchoff's equations through modified nodal analysis. These field and circuit analysis components are consistently interfaced and the resulting coupled set of nonlinear equations is evolved in time by a multidimensional Newton-Raphson scheme. The solution procedure is accelerated by allocating field- and circuit-related computations across the processors of a distributed-memory cluster, which communicate using the message-passing interface standard. Furthermore, the electromagnetic field solver, whose demand for computational resources far outpaces that of the circuit solver, is accelerated by a fast Fourier transform (FFT)-based algorithm, viz. the time-domain adaptive integral method. The resulting parallel FFT accelerated transient field-circuit simulator is applied to the analysis of various active and nonlinear microwave circuits, including power-combining arrays.