Ansys is committed to setting today's students up for success, by providing free simulation engineering software to students.
Ansys is committed to setting today's students up for success, by providing free simulation engineering software to students.
Ansys is committed to setting today's students up for success, by providing free simulation engineering software to students.
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ANSYS BLOG
August 18, 2021
There are many parameters that affect the design of vias – the critical interconnects between layers of printed circuit boards (PCBs) – and any one of them could lead to subpar performance or manufacturing challenges. Optimization algorithms can run through as many designs as needed to find the designs that meet certain optimization goals, but this “black box” approach doesn’t let you see which parameters are most important to via design, so it’s difficult to perform a cost tradeoff analysis or wring the most performance from the design. With Ansys HFSS 3D Layout and Ansys optiSLang, you can understand which parameters most affect the output of the design so you can improve it.
In the “Differential Via Optimization with Ansys HFSS 3D Layout and Ansys optiSLang” webinar, you’ll learn how to gain the most insight into a differential via design to optimize its performance and to study how manufacturing tolerances impact manufacturing yields.
HFSS 3D Layout is geared toward PCB-like geometries where we can use our HFSS solver to analyze these structures. Any time we have layered geometries we find in a PCB, package or chip, we can use HFSS 3D layout. It is optimized for interacting with layered geometries.
Ansys optiSLang is not just an optimization tool, though it does enable you use many different algorithms to optimize a design. At its core is variational analysis. If you give a parametrized simulation to optiSLang, it can control the input parameters and analyze their impact on the outputs of that simulation. Because optiSLang is software agnostic, you can take the output of one solver and use it as the input of another solver.
In the on-demand webinar, I walk you through an optimization of a via in an 18-layer PCB with FR4 substrates. The via is designed to connect coupled microstrips on layer 1 to coupled strip lines on layer 7. The optimization goals are simple for demonstration purposes:
At a high level, this optimization approach focuses on gaining insight into the design by performing a sensitivity analysis to explore the design space, which ensures we are locating the global optimum, not a local one; determines what parameters have the most impact on the differential return loss; and enables you to perform optimizations based on a metamodel. You can decide to move on or, if time is available and every bit of performance should be squeezed out of the design, a direct optimization can be run as efficiently as possible using the knowledge gained from the sensitivity analysis.
With the sensitivity analysis, optiSLang looks at ranges of input parameters and creates a design of experiments (DoE) that HFSS 3D Layout evaluates. Ansys optiSLang then fits a metamodel of optimal prognosis (MOP), which it uses to quickly study a design without requiring HFSS to evaluate additional designs of interest.
The MOP is a mathematical model that can be used in place of an explicit simulation to quickly predict the output of a design. optiSLang contains many different metamodels that it fits to the model using a subset of data. You can see how it compares to the actual response from the simulation to get a coefficient of prognosis to assess which metamodel does the best job of predicting data that we have not explicitly solved for yet.
It’s an adaptive approach that continuously improves the accuracy of the metamodel, while also finding better and better designs. The adaptive MOP approach is perfect tradeoff between gaining insight into the design and having the most robsut approach to optimizing the design.
The robustness analysis shows what percentage of manufactured devices fails a specified design requirement. This analysis will also indicate which of the manufacturing tolerances must be improved to increase the yield.
I hope that’s enough to whet your appetite. To explore the details of how to gain more insights from optimization, check out the “Differential Via Optimization with Ansys HFSS 3D Layout and Ansys optiSLang” webinar.
We’re here to answer your questions and look forward to speaking with you. A member of our Ansys sales team will contact you shortly.