Microwave Journal
www.microwavejournal.com/articles/15786-xfdtd-release-6-6

XFdtd® Release 6.6

January 17, 2011


XFdtd® Release 6.6 includes some exciting new innovations, the most notable of which is added Hearing Aid Compatibility (HAC) functionality for cell phone designers. Other new features include automatic adaptive mesh enhancements and additional diagnostics data.

New in XFdtd 6.6
Improved tools for verifying solid versus mesh agreement
Enhanced functionality in Automatic Adaptive Meshes
Faster mesh loading
Greater control over Automatic Convergence criteria
Augmented functionality specific to Hearing Aid Compatibility (HAC)
Additional data available for steady-state results
Performance optimization for Static Voltage Solver
Enhancements to parallel computing cluster (MPI) version
Additional antenna performance data

Other industry-leading features:
Mature MPI solution
GPU accelerated results via XStream®
Multiple frequency-specific results (i.e., efficiency, SAR, antenna patterns) from one transient simulation
Full 64-bit GUI and calculation engine
Rotating B-field display for MRI calculation
s Improved results by using Cole-Cole parameters for biological tissue properties
Periodic boundary conditions with phase shift
Nonlinear diodes with variable parameters
Independently specify time delay for multiple sources
More advanced meshing technology to prevent unwanted shorts
Voxel-format object

Overview
XFdtd is a full wave electromagnetic solver based on the Finite Difference Time Domain method. It is fully three-dimensional. Complicated CAD objects with thousands of parts may be imported into XFdtd and combined and edited within XFdtd using the internal graphical editor. RF designers can import an electromechanical CAD file, improve the design using XFdtd, then export the revised CAD file to reduce design time. Applications include microwave, RF, antennas, scattering, biological EM including MRI and SAR, photonics, packaging, EMC, and electromagnetic behavior of specialized materials.

XFdtd offers many important and unique capabilities including Fast Meshing Algorithm, mesh preview before calculation, a wide variety of complex electric and magnetic materials including nonlinear and frequency-dependent, nonlinear device modeling including both diodes and capacitors, anisotropic materials, and many others. XFdtd is the only commercial time domain solver with true MPI capability which allows large problems to utilize the full capability of computer clusters. XFdtd supports XStream hardware FDTD for extremely fast calculations using the graphics processing units in high speed video cards. No other EM software can solve larger problems or solve them faster than XFdtd.