BANDWIDTH REDUCED FULL-WAVE SIMULATION OF LOSSLESS AND THIN PLANAR MICROSTRIP CIRCUITS

Abstract

We present a full-wave, high-performance, numerical scheme for the analysis of planar microstrip circuits which is based on an efficient electromagnetic formulation of the field problem and on the bandwidth reduction of the discretized sparse matrix. The above mentioned electromagnetic efficiency is at-tained by considering a Mixed Potential Integral Equa-tion (MPIE) with the kernel expressed by closed-form spatial-domain Green’s functions; as a consequence, the reaction integrals are evaluated by using just one-dimensional numerical integration over a finite spatial do-main. Moment method discretization of the MPIE leads to the corresponding matrix problem. The accurate analysis of the matrix properties shows that a sparsity of 70-85% in the discretized linear system can be routinely enforced without significantly altering the solution accuracy. A new scheme for the sparse matrix bandwidth reduc-tion, particularly tailored for electromagnetic problems, can be therefore introduced, leading to considerable re-ductions of the simulation time. Results are presented demonstrating that the use of a bandwidth reduction strategy coupled with efficient problem-matched Green’s functions allows as to obtain speed-ups in simulation time of more than one order of magnitude with respect to stan-dard state of the art implementations.