CST E-News June 2008

Welcome to the June edition of CST's E-News, our series of regular news and feature updates. We hope that you find the contents relevant, interesting and informative. Should you receive this email more than once, please accept our apologies. Any feedback and suggestions for future editions is welcome.

News in brief

1. CST STUDIO SUITE™ 2009 - first preview
2. MPI based parallelization for CST MICROWAVE STUDIO® v2009
3. CST events at MTT-S IMS
4. What's next in CST STUDIO SUITE?
5. CST STUDIO SUITE™ 2009 features two new products
6. www.cst.com - application notes
7. Calendar of events

CST STUDIO SUITE™ 2009 - first preview

CST will be previewing the upcoming release of CST STUDIO SUITE™ version 2009 at MTT-S IMS in Atlanta. The list of new features is pretty long and impressive, but for this newsletter we will focus on the most significant ones.

At the end of 2007 we acquired the Linmic circuit simulator. This technology will be made available to you in two ways. Firstly for circuit simulation in CST DESIGN STUDIO™, and secondly, and more significantly, in true transient 3D EM/circuit co-simulation with CST MICROWAVE STUDIO®. This feature is particularly interesting when simulating, for example, a PCB with a large number of lumped elements. Instead of having to derive a full S-matrix first, you can now directly plug in the lumped elements through the CST DS interface, which drastically reduces simulation time.

With v2009, the user interface is ported to 64bit in order to handle the increasing complexity of imported models. The interactivity of the GUI has also been improved, with features like mouse controlled transformation and alignment, and the bending of sheets onto the surfaces of solids for conformal modelling.

Numerous performance improvements have been made to the entire suite of solvers. We would like to highlight three here.

The performance of the I-solver as been significantly improved. Besides MLFMM, there is also a unique iterative MoM solver available now. This can - thanks to its excellent n log (n) scaling - be profitably employed for solving structures which are electrically not that large (at least by I-solver standards), i.e. smaller than 20 wavelengths.

The mesh adaptation of the tetrahedral solver now snaps to the geometry. This means, that unlike other (if not all) comparable HF-FEM solutions, the mesh adaptation improves the geometry approximation as well!

And finally the transient thermal solver, which was first introduced as part of a CST STUDIO SUITE™ 2008 service pack has been further advanced and also includes the bio heat equation. The required parameters will be included in the material descriptions for the HUGO voxel model.

MPI based parallelization for CST MICROWAVE STUDIO® v2009

Parallelization based on a Message Passing Interface (MPI) has been implemented in version 2009. This enables the solution to extremely large problems by employing computer clusters, thus extending the boundaries of 3D EM simulation.

If you are involved in the simulation of very complex and detail rich structures, such as multilayered PCB boards or electrically large structures, you will benefit most from CST's latest development. By decomposing the calculation domain into several parts and distributing these parts to computers in a cluster, the simulation of models with many hundreds of millions of mesh nodes becomes feasible. This type of parallelization is most effective if the single parts of the decomposition are sufficiently large, since the communication overhead between the interface limits the achievable speed-up. The MPI based parallelization extends the range of our hardware related simulation performance optimization activities towards model sizes beyond the reach of currently available hardware acceleration boards. The CST MWS MPI based parallelization runs on homogenous Windows or Linux clusters.

CST events at MTT-S IMS

The International Microwave Symposium is the headline conference of the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (MTT-S).

CST has a packed schedule at IMS 2008. Not only will we be manning our booth (#933), giving online demonstrations, holding our annual IMS customer appreciation party, and sponsoring the show’s lanyards, but we are also featuring in two workshops.

Workshop Presentations
Sunday, 08:00-17:00, Advances in CAD Techniques for EM Modeling and Design Optimization.
9) "Complete Technology for 3D Electromagnic Simulations", Dr. Peter Thoma, CST

Friday, 08:00 - 17:00, Unification of Time Domain Methods in Computational Electromagnetics.
4) "MOM vs. FDTD vs. FIT vs. FEM vs. TLM and Frequency Domain vs. Time Domain", Dr. Holm Krueger, CST

Slamdunking Event!
CST's annual IMS customer appreciation party will be staged at the close of show on Wednesday, June 18. Please join us for drinks, finger food and fun on booth #933. Print and bring along your invitation to secure entrance.

Be sure to stop by our booth #933 for an online demonstration and discussion of your application needs.

What's next in CST STUDIO SUITE™?

We have just finished the coding phase for CST STUDIO SUITE™ 2009, so this is the perfect moment to invite you to participate in discussions on our future direction. If one or two features would make an impact on your work, please let us know; we will try to integrate your suggestions into our planning.

You should describe your idea and the benefit it will have in your application area as precisely as possible and send it to news@cst.com.

We appreciate your input.

CST STUDIO SUITE™ 2009 features two new products

The CST STUDIO SUITE™ solver family will extend to become more comprehensive with version 2009. As a result of the partnership with SimLab, two new modules will be made available to you soon: CST PCB STUDIO™ and CST CABLE STUDIO™.

The names are pretty self explanatory. CST PCB STUDIO™ focuses on signal and power integrity, EMC/EMI effects on PCBs, whereas CST CABLE STUDIO™ deals with SI/EMC/EMI on cable harnesses. Both tools can supply surface currents as excitation sources for radiation analysis to CST MICROWAVE STUDIO® solver modules. For more information about these new members of the family, please take a look at:

http://www.cst.com/Content/Documents/Products/CST_PCBS_2008_low.pdf http://www.cst.com/Content/Documents/Products/CST_CS_2008_low.pdf

www.cst.com - application notes

The range of customer examples illustrated in the applications section of the CST website is being extended continuously.

Featured in this newsletter is a presentation made at the 5th North American User Forum, 2008 by John Contreras and Al Wallash of Hitachi Global Storage Technologies: "Applications of 3D Electromagnetic Modeling in Magnetic Recording: ESD and Signal Integrity"

Calendar of events

Check our calendar of events for the next CST event in your area.

Workshops
workshop series

Exhibitions
CST is exhibiting at conferences and exhibitions around the world.

Training sessions
Interested in improving your simulation skills? Regular training courses are held in CST's offices in Asia, Europe, and North America. Advance registration is normally required.

 

With kind regards,
Your CST Team

CST - Changing the Standards
Computer Simulation Technology
info@cst.com, www.cst.com