Rectangular/Triangular Hybrid Mesh Generation for Electromagnetic Analysis of Integrated Circuits

This paper presents a novel hybrid mesh generation algorithm for electromagnetic analysis of radio frequency integrated circuits (RFIC) using the method of moments (MoM). Due to its characteristics, MoM prefers rectangular or triangular meshes instead of quadrilateral meshes. Using rectangular mesh can reduce the number of unknowns in the matrix equation and improve efficiency. To generate such meshes for multi-layer IC structures, we propose a region decomposition method that maximizes rectangular sub-regions. Rectangular meshes are generated directly in these sub-regions, while grid-based methods generate rectangular/triangular meshes in remaining sub-regions. The final mesh is obtained by merging meshes of all sub-regions using a new method for connecting mesh edges at vias and merging small vias in the via layer. To obtain fine and dense elements along the boundary, we introduce a subdivision method of boundary elements, which is essential when considering current skin effects in ICs. We test our algorithm on a large number of actual ICs and find that the generated mesh has high quality, meeting the requirements of model discretization for IC electromagnetic analysis.