EE SEMINAR: A macromodeling approach to accelerate multiscale EM simulations, with application to metasurface antennas, 3D ICs and power cables

Electromagnetic simulations play a crucial role in the design of antennas, integrated circuits, and power grids. Unfortunately, the multiscale structure of many practical designs defies even the best method of moments (MoM) solvers. For example, while metasurface antennas have thousands of unit cells, existing simulators can barely handle a few cells.

We present a new macromodeling concept to efficiently model multiscale objects in MoM solvers. Given a closed surface S, the proposed macromodels are able to capture the electromagnetic response of the enclosed objects using only an equivalent electric current distribution on S. This current is related to the tangential electric field using a novel surface admittance operator. We show that a single macromodel can accurately capture the electromagnetic response of an intricate metasurface unit cell, leading to significant savings over a state-of-art MoM solver in terms of CPU time (up to 24X) and memory consumption (up to 12X).

We also show that the proposed operators can accurately model skin effect in conductors of arbitrary shape. This approach is computationally efficient, since it requires only a surface mesh, but broadband and Maxwell-accurate. We present examples related to the electromagnetic analysis of 3D integrated circuits and underground cables for energy distribution.

Bio: Piero Triverio received the Ph.D. degree in Electronic Engineering from Politecnico di Torino, Italy, in 2009. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto, and in the Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering. He holds the Canada Research Chair in Computational Electromagnetics. His research interests include signal integrity, computational electromagnetism, model order reduction, and computational fluid dynamics applied to cardiovascular diseases.

Prof. Triverio received the Best Paper Award of the IEEE Transactions on Advanced Packaging (2007), the EuMIC Young Engineer Prize (2010), the Connaught New Researcher Award (2013), and the Ontario Early Researcher Award (2016). Triverio and his students won several awards at international conferences, including the Best Paper Award of the IEEE Conference on Electrical Performance of Electronic Packaging and Systems (2008, 2017).