Full-Wave Analysis of Large-Scale Interconnects Using the Multilevel UV Method With the Sparse Matrix Iterative Approach (SMIA)

Moving towards the goal of analyzing whole printed circuit boards (PCBs) and packages using full-wave electromagnetic (EM) methods, the multilevel UV method is applied to the method-of-moments (MoM) solution of the current on large-scale interconnects. The MoM solution uses the layered media Green's functions computed using the numerical modified steepest-descent path (NMSP) method, and is applied to the exterior layers of the interconnect structure. The sparse matrix iterative approach (SMIA) is used to speed up the solution of the iterative matrix solver. The iterative solver is also accelerated by using larger blocks in the block diagonal inverse preconditioner. With the multilevel UV method, a fast solution is presented for solving the current on large-scale interconnects on thin layered structures at high frequencies. We show an example of an interconnect structure that has horizontal dimensions of 12.675 lambda × 12.876 lambda with 24\thinspace 848 current unknowns and an interconnect fractional area of approximately 31%. This problem takes a total of 21 min 20 s to solve for the current on the traces on a Pentium 3.2-GHz CPU with 4 GB of RAM.