An Edge-based Smoothed FEM for Accurate High-Speed Interconnect Modeling

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce an accurate edge-based smoothed finite element method (ES-FEM) to model high-speed interconnects. Unlike the traditional FEM, the computational domain is first divided into nonoverlapping smoothing domains associated with each triangle edge. Then, the smoothed gradient technique is used to smooth the gradient elements and we could obtain much “softer” stiff matrix in ES-FEM. Numerical experiments show that the ES-FEM could obtain more accurate results compared with the traditional FEM and is independent of mesh quality, which shows great potential to solve practical complex interconnect problems.