What's Your Focus?

From microwave and RF components and antennas, to high-speed IC and package designs, HFSS™ delivers unparalleled accuracy, capacity and speed, ensuring reduced engineering time and increased productivity for a wide range of applications.

Antennas | Passive Components | Advanced Packages
On-chip Passives | High-speed Interconnects | 3D Via Design | Gigabit Backplane Design

Antenna Systems
HFSS is the industry standard for analyzing arbitrary 3D radiating elements such slot, horn, linear wire and patch antennas along with their polarization properties such as axial ratio, co- and cross-polarization. HFSS automatically computes critical metrics such as gain, directivity, input impedance, efficiency, and near- and far-field radiation patterns. HFSS can link field data between multiple HFSS models to capture the entire behavior of the Antenna system from transmitter to receiver including the active RF front-end through dynamic co-simulation with Nexxim. Coupled with circuit simulation in Nexxim, antenna engineers design state-of-the-art array feed networks and transceivers coupled with the radiating elements for a rigorous analysis of the complete antenna system.

RF/mW passive component design
HFSS allows engineers to characterize and achieve optimum performance from their connectors, filters, couplers, circulators, ferrites, MEM devices and waveguides. Combining Optimetrics (a smart parametric and optimization engine) and HFSS allows users to address manufacturability with parametric analysis, optimization, sensitivity analysis, and other design studies. Furthermore, engineering teams can employ the new Distributed Solve Option (DSO) to accelerate the solve time of all parametric design studies by distributing parametric instances across an unlimited number of computing machines, thereby providing greater design insight in a fraction of the time.

Advanced package co-design for single and multi-chip integration.
HFSS provides S-parameters and radiating fields for the 3D structures used to integrate multiple die and embedded passives into a single package or module. Accurate accounting for off-chip passive component behavior and package parasitics is critical to optimizing performance of CMOS, SiGe and GaAs ICs. Together, HFSS and Nexxim provide EM/circuit co-simulation for accurate prediction of the interactions between the package and the non-linear behavior of the IC including load and source pulling from non-ideal impedance terminations.

On-chip passives
HFSS™ uses full-wave 3D simulation to create models for on-chip passives with accuracy traceable to the foundry process. For spiral inductors, the inductance and quality factor (Q) is computed by HFSS using advanced full-wave, finite-element simulation. For extremely sensitive IC blocks such as VCOs, HFSS extracts the full layout at the block level capturing layout effects (interconnect structures and substrate coupling) that shift resonant frequencies, expected power levels or produce spurious oscillations.

High-speed packages and interconnects
Beyond 1 GHz, S-parameters provide the best representation of the electrical characteristics of very high-speed interconnects. HFSS™ provides GHz-accurate S-parameter and Full-Wave SPICE™ models for complex trace routing, vias and transitions, connectors and IC packages. High-performance electronic designs often include operating specifications for signal integrity in the time domain and for power integrity in the frequency domain. Common time-domain parameters, such as eye-diagrams, jitter, TDR measurements and SSN as well as frequency-domain metrics such as resonances, phase-noise margins, power plane impedance, and insertion loss appear within the same spec sheet. HFSS™ provides all of these swept frequency simulations with full-wave S-parameters generated by detailed electromagnetic analysis or combines with Nexxim® to provide accurate transient results. For high-speed differential transmission lines, HFSS produces differential S-parameters, allowing high-speed design engineers to achieve optimum signal path performance, determining route layer trade-offs, via stub and anti-pad radius impact.

3D Via Design
The Via Wizard is a powerful tool that allows for quick setup of via models in the 3D field solver HFSS. Using a straight-forward GUI, a user can enter all parameters necessary to create an arbitrary via array. Most projects will be launched ready to solve in HFSS however the user may easily modify or add to the geometry created by the wizard.

Gigabit Backplane Design
The Gigabit Backplane Signal Integrity Design Kit is based on the Xilinx MK322 Evaluation Board for the Xilinx Virtex-II™ Pro X FPGA. This virtual design kit provides Ansoft parameterized circuit, planar electromagnetic (EM), and 3D EM models, which can be used to correlate simulation with measured results. The real power of this kit, however, is the ability to perform extremely accurate what-if analysis, in both the time and frequency domain, for a variety of layout and design modifications.

Antenna Design Kit
The HFSS Antenna Design Kit is a stand-alone GUI-based utility which automates the geometry creation, solution setup, and post-processing reports for over 25 antenna elements. This tool allows antenna designers to efficiently analyze common antenna types using HFSS and also assists new users in learning to use HFSS for antenna design. The design kit can be integrated into the HFSS user interface or launched from the standard Windows menu. All antenna models created by the design kit are ready to simulate in HFSS.