Ansoft has released version 11 of its flagship product, HFSS, with new technology said to deliver greater accuracy, capacity and performance. New higher-order hierarchical basis functions and an iterative solver provide accurate fields using smaller meshes and more efficient solutions for large multiwavelength structures.

HFSS is used for 3-D full-wave electromagnetic field simulation, which is critical for the design of high-performance electronic devices that are more portable, smaller in size and operate at higher frequencies. Such devices include RF/microwave components, on-chip passives, PCB interconnects, antennas and IC packages.

A new fault-tolerant, high-quality finite element meshing algorithm allows HFSS to simulate complex models two to five times faster using half of the memory compared to previous versions.

Ansoft chairman and chief executive officer Zoltan Cendes said the new technology in HFSS v11 allows customers to perform “massive simulations of structures that were simply too large to solve previously." He said designers of high-frequency and high-speed components can now explore electromagnetic performance over a range of dimensions, orientations, material parameters and frequencies – and gain design insights – that were not possible before.

The dynamic link between HFSS, Nexxim and Ansoft Designer creates a powerful electromagnetic-based design flow, the company said. Nexxim is a combined frequency- and time-domain circuit simulator, and Ansoft Designer is an integrated schematic and design management front-end. This design flow enables users to merge complex, highly nonlinear transistor-level circuits with 3D full-wave accurate component models to solve challenging high-performance electronic designs.

HFSS v11 is available on Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP Professional, Windows XP x64 Edition, Windows Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux v3, Solaris 8 and Solaris 9.