Researchers in Singapore have created a new computer tool they say could speed up the electronic design process by more quickly ensuring electromagnetic compatibility.
“Electromagnetic interference is a critical problem for the electronics industry,” Xian-Ke Gao from the A*STAR Institute of High Performance Computing in Singapore said. “Engineers are keen to understand how the electronic circuits react. However, it is difficult to measure such effects experimentally, because disassembling the device would affect the physical testing.” Computer modeling tools are often used to address this problem, but these programs are cumbersome and require a lot of computing power.
Now, Gao and his colleagues have developed a computer model capable of solving such problems more than ten times faster than existing programs. The new software is based on an existing approach used to measure interference effects that employs mathematical equations to describe the electrical currents in a conducting wire. The physics of these “transmission-line equations” are well understood and, once adapted to the unique properties of circuit boards, are far easier to solve using a computer algorithm than other, simpler modeling tools, the researchers say.
Initial tests of the new A*STAR modeling tool indicated the program exhibits “good agreement, especially for the main region of interest—frequencies below one gigahertz.”
Speed, however, is the primary advantage of the software—while commercial software requires more than two hours of computing on a standard laptop, the A*STAR software package required less than 10 minutes to complete the same task.
“Our computational problem-solving kit can shorten electromagnetic interference trouble-shooting in the product design phase and therefore translates into time and cost savings for the industry,” Gao said.
