Skip to Main Content

Ansys HFSS
Best-In-Class 3D High Frequency Structure Simulation Software

Multipurpose, full wave 3D electromagnetic (EM) simulation software for designing and simulating high-frequency electronic products such as antennas, components, interconnects, connectors, ICs and PCBs.

3D EM SIMULATION SOFTWARE

3D Electromagnetic Field Simulator for RF and Wireless Design

Ansys HFSS is a 3D electromagnetic (EM) simulation software for designing and simulating high-frequency electronic products such as antennas, antenna arrays, RF or microwave components, high-speed interconnects, filters, connectors, IC packages and printed circuit boards. Engineers worldwide use Ansys HFSS software to design high-frequency, high-speed electronics found in communications systems, advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), satellites, and internet-of-things (IoT) products.

  • Electromagnetics icon
    Component-to-System EM Workflow
  • Electromagnetics icon
    Coupled EM System Solver
  • Electromagnetics icon
    Encrypted 3D Design Share
  • Electromagnetics icon
    Automatic Adaptive Meshing

Product Specs

HFSS’s unmatched capacity, coupled with indisputable accuracy, enables engineers to address RF, microwave, IC, PCB and EMI problems for most complex systems.

*only available with Electronics Enterprise

  • Antenna Design Toolkit
  • Radar Pre/Post Processing
  • Frequency and Time Domain FEM
  • Hybrid FEM/IE/SBR+ Solver
  • NEW: ISO-26262 Compliant
  • 3D Layout ECAD Flow
  • *SBR+ Accelerated Doppler Processing
  • Integral Equation (MoM)
  • Memory Matrix Solvers
  • 5G Post-Processing
  • Concurrent Initial 3D Meshing
  • SBR+ for Large Scale EMs
  • Multipaction Solver

From Chips to Ships, Solve Them All with HFSS

How Ansys HFSS Mesh Fusion solves much larger designs than ever thought possible

Easily mesh and plot fields of any large complex electromagnetic system with Ansys HFSS, such as a drone with package, PCB, cables and antennas

HFSS Mesh Fusion continues to use the same “electromagnetically aware” adaptive meshing technology as before without compromising accuracy because a fully coupled electromagnetic matrix is solved with each adaptive mesh step and for each point in a frequency sweep.

HFSS Mesh Fusion’s patented technology enables much more complex designs to be simulated with the same rigor, accuracy and reliability of Ansys HFSS. It accomplishes this by applying targeted meshing technologies within the same design, appropriate to the local geometry.

HFSS Mesh Fusion continues to use the same “electromagnetically aware” adaptive meshing technology as before without compromising accuracy because a fully coupled electromagnetic matrix is solved with each adaptive mesh step and for each point in a frequency sweep.

July 2024

What's New

New capabilities and improvements in performance, meshing, and modeling are opening up new application spaces for Ansys HFSS.

2024 R2 HF Electronics
HFSS General Parallel Component Adapt for Mesh Fusion

HFSS adaptive mesh refinement is now parallelized across cores, clusters, or Ansys® Cloud™ enabling a fully coupled, uncompromised EM matrix extraction.


HFSS Applications

View All Applications

HFSS Case Studies

Ansys Case Study

Live Wire

Researchers designed an unusually compact wearable antenna that covers the entire instrument, scientific and measurement band.

Ansys Case Study

ANYWAVES

ANYWAVES Uses Ansys Simulation Software to Develop Next-Generation Miniature Antennas

Ansys Case Study radar

Making Waves

At Chemring Technology Solutions, Ansys HFSS plays a key role in most projects involving wireless communications, radar and high-frequency networking in which electromagnetic fields are critical.

Ansys Case Study prototyping

Andar Technologies

Virtual prototypes from Ansys HFSS allow Andar to create innovative designs and reduce the amount of physical prototyping to a minimum.

HFSS Application Briefs

Ansys Case Study

How Complex Phased Array Antennas and Platforms Interact

Let’s look at the design and development of phased array antennas and analyze its performance on a moving platform like a naval ship. 

FAQs

Ansys HFSS is a 3D electromagnetic simulation software solution for designing and simulating high-frequency electronic products such as antennas, RF and microwave components, high-speed interconnects, filters, connectors, IC components and packages and printed circuit boards.

To install Ansys HFSS, you must be an Ansys customer and have access to the Customer Portal. Ansys HFSS is included in the Electronics software bundle and is also included in the free Ansys Student bundle.

Yes, STL is an import option in HFSS. For finite element model (FEM) analysis, STL files are converted to the HFSS modeler format. For IE and SBR+ analysis, there is an option to import and directly solve to the STL facets.

To download Ansys HFSS, you must be an Ansys customer and have access to the Customer Portal. Ansys HFSS is included in the Electronics software bundle and is also included in the free Ansys Student bundle.

You can learn about Ansys HFSS in several different ways depending on whether you are an existing customer or a student or non-customer. 

Intro to Ansys HFSS is a free course available on our Ansys Innovation Courses site where you will learn the basics of Ansys HFSS geometry design and the EM simulation workflow. 

These HFSS courses are available to Ansys Customers.

 

Get step-by-step instructions on designing antennas in Ansys HFSS in this video, which demonstrates how to create the geometry of the dipole antenna and discusses features in HFSS for antenna analysis. "How to Design Antennas in Ansys HFSS."

Physics Defines the Mesh; Mesh Does Not Define the Physics

The Ansys HFSS simulation suite consists of a comprehensive set of solvers to address diverse electromagnetic problems ranging in detail and scale from passive IC components to extremely large-scale EM analyses such as automotive radar scenes for ADAS systems. Its reliable automatic adaptive mesh refinement lets you focus on the design instead of spending time determining and creating the best mesh.

This automation and guaranteed accuracy differentiates HFSS from all other EM simulators, which require manual user control and multiple solutions to ensure that the generated mesh is suitable and accurate.

HFSS Capabilities

 

Key Features

HFSS is the premier EM tool for R&D and virtual design prototyping. It reduces design cycle time and boosts your product’s reliability and performance.

  • EMI/EMC analysis
  • Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) in complex environments
  • Installed antenna and RF cosite analysis
  • RF systems and circuits analysis
  • Signal and Power Integrity analysis

Users can take advantage of the seamless workflow in Electronics Desktop, which includes advanced electromagnetic field solvers, and dynamically link them to power circuit simulators to predict EMI/EMC performance of electrical devices. These integrated workflows avoid repetitive design iterations and costly recurrent EMC certification tests. Multiple EM solvers intended to address diverse electromagnetic problems, as well as the circuit simulators in Electronics Desktop, help engineers assess the overall performance of their electrical devices and create interference-free designs. These diverse problems range from radiated and conducted emissions, susceptibility, crosstalk, RF desense, RF coexistence, cosite, electrostatic discharge, electric fast transients (EFT), burst, lightning strike effects, high intensity fields (HIRF), radiation hazards (RADHAZ), electromagnetic environmental effects (EEE), electromagnetic pulse (EMP) to shielding effectiveness and other EMC applications.

EMIT’s powerful analysis engine computes all important RF interactions including non-linear system component effects. Diagnosing RFI in complex environments is notoriously difficult and expensive to perform in a testing environment, but with EMIT’s dynamic linked results views, the identification of the root-cause of any interference is rapidly accomplished via graphical signal trace-back and diagnostic summaries that show the exact origin and path that interfering signals take to each receiver. Once the cause of interference is uncovered, EMIT enables rapid evaluation of various RFI mitigation measures in order to arrive at the optimum solution. The new HFSS/EMIT Datalink allows the model for RFI analysis to be created in EMIT directly from the physical 3D model of the installed antennas in HFSS. This provides a seamless end-to-end workflow for a complete RFI solution for RF environments ranging from large platform cosite interference to receiver desense in electronic devices.

A candidate array design can examine input impedances of all elements under any beam scan condition. Phased array antennas can be optimized for performance at the element, subarray or complete array level based on element match (passive or driven) far-field and near-field pattern behavior over any scan condition of interest. Infinite array modeling involves one or more antenna elements placed within a unit cell. The cell contains periodic boundary conditions on the surrounding walls to mirror fields, creating an infinite number of elements. Element scan impedance and embedded element radiation patterns can be computed, including all mutual coupling effects. The method is especially useful for predicting array-blind scan angles that can occur under certain array beam steering conditions. Finite array simulation technology leverages domain decomposition with the unit cell to obtain a fast solution for large finite-sized arrays. This technology makes it possible to perform complete array analysis to predict all mutual coupling, scan impedance, element patterns, array patterns and array edge effects.

It includes EMIT, a unique multi-fidelity approach for predicting RF system performance in complex RF environments with multiple sources of interference. EMIT also provides the diagnostic tools needed to quickly identify root-cause RFI issues and mitigate problems early in the design cycle.

HFSS with SI Circuits can handle the complexity of modern interconnect design from die-to-die across ICs, packages, connectors and PCBs. By leveraging the HFSS advanced electromagnetic field simulation capability dynamically linked to powerful circuit and system simulation, engineers can understand the performance of high-speed electronic products long before building a prototype in hardware.

The ability to simulate encrypted HFSS 3D components means that you no longer need to compromise on accuracy. Designers are no longer forced to use circuit-level components (e.g., S-parameter models) vs. true 3D models into their design, impacting the overall simulation accuracy.

It enables prospective customers of vendors to use encrypted 3D Components in a full system design. The end user receives more confidence in the validity of results by rigorously considering coupling effects of the integration while also protecting the vendor’s design IP. In addition, it also provides full, uncompromised simulation fidelity for encrypted 3D components with HFSS and adaptive meshing delivering its gold-standard accuracy.

HFSS multipaction solver is based on a finite-element particle-in-cell (PIC) method. HFSS provides the multipaction analysis as a postprocessing of the frequency-domain field solutions. With few steps to set up the excitations and boundary conditions for charged particle simulation, you can check whether your design meets the standard for multipaction breakdown prevention.

HFSS RESOURCES & EVENTS

Featured Webinars

Webinar on Demand
HFSS live webinar
Ansys 2023 R1: What’s New in Ansys HFSS

Building on decades of R&D in computational electromagnetics, HFSS brings new capabilities to users in the form of improved workflows in 3D layout and further optimizations in distributed computing for its Mesh Fusion solver.

Webinar Series
HFSS 3D Layout Webinar Series
HFSS 3D Layout Webinar Series

This webinar series shows you how the HFSS adaptive meshing technology handles massive PCB layout geometries and gives you the most accurate results using real customer examples.

On Demand Webinar
Using HPC Capabilities in Ansys HFSS
Novel, Efficient Antenna System Design Using HPC Capabilities in Ansys HFSS

This webinar will chart the progress of HFSS with respect to antenna design and how it has evolved into the established leader in the field.


White Papers & Articles

2021-09-ANSYS-og.jpg

Physics-based Synthetic Data for Real World Radar Applications

In this technical paper, Ansys subject matter expert Arien Sligar explains the use of electromagnetic simulation technology derived from Ansys HFSS along with a digital engineering methodology for generating synthetic data to train an ML algorithm for automotive radar.


Videos


Ansys software is accessible

It's vital to Ansys that all users, including those with disabilities, can access our products. As such, we endeavor to follow accessibility requirements based on the US Access Board (Section 508), Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), and the current format of the Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT).

See What Ansys Can Do For You

Contact us today

* = Required Field

Thank you for reaching out!

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.

Footer Image