Successful Practices for the Modeling of Printed Circuit Boards and Substrates Using Electromagnetic Field Solvers

The aim of this work is to provide strategies for creating highly accurate models of printed circuit boards (PCBs) and substrates using electromagnetic field solvers. It will examine how to choose the correct field solver for a particular application from among full-wave, modal decomposition, finite element and boundary element methods. Tradeoffs between time and accuracy of the different solvers will be discussed. The focus is on model creation for use in time domain circuit simulators, but analysis of the frequency domain data will be used to correlate measurement to simulation. The problem of correlating simulation results with measurements is also discussed. A physical layer reference design (PLRD) board has been constructed, measured and simulated with the various field solvers. The results are analyzed to understand why differences occur between simulation and measured data. The impacts of these differences on system-level simulations of high-speed serial links are studied using a circuit simulator.