News

The Release of Version 8.0
Wednesday, September 30, 2009

We are very proud to announce the release of a new version of our software, v.8.0. We have accomplished a number of new, important improvements and we would like to share them with you.

We want to make sure that you are aware of the many major and minor enhancements our program now includes:

General Enhancements

  • The visualization tools have been enhanced. The major improvement is the ability to do gradient contour plots which will make use of the entire colour spectrum.
  • The addition of log plots to contours, arrows and isosurfaces. This can be extremely useful when viewing data over many orders of magnitude.
  • Profile plots have had a major facelift in both 2D and 3D. These can now produce some novel looking plots for presentation purposes.
  • In the settings and document properties post processing dialogue, custom plot colours can be defined. Experimentation with these new options can produce some special effects not possible before.
  • A new transparency setting is available for contours and profiles in 3D. As with all other enhancements, some more advanced special effects can be produced.
  • Ambient temperature can be defined globally and changed parametrically. This is useful for “what if” scenarios if a device is being operated in different temperature environments.

3D Enhancements

AMPERES, FARADAY, CELSIUS, SINGULA, COULOMB

The greatest revolution of 3D BEM software is now included in this version which provides the ability to parallelize computations. It has been found experimentally that using dual quad core processors reduces the execution time by almost a factor of eight. This is due to the inherent parallelization of BEM code, provided great care is taken at the programming level. Combining this ability with 64 bit processors using 32 gigabytes of memory, speed increases of better than 50 times have been attained compared to the older 32 bit, single processor machines with 4 gigabytes of memory. For this reason we strongly recommend upgrading your PC to 64 bit machines, with quad processors and as much memory as possible. As most of our software suppliers are moving away from 32 bit code, it is only a matter of time before we will no longer be able to support 32 bit computing.

AMPERES

The nonlinear calculations in Amperes have been greatly improved. For some problems where convergence was slow, or unattainable the new algorithms are working very robustly.

AMPERES, FARADAY, CELSIUS, COULOMB

The self-adaptive algorithms have been altered to work well with 3D BEM code. For many problems, the self-adaptive option is more accurate and faster than the manual placement of elements.

SINGULA

The far zone field properties dialogue has had major revisions. It is now consistent with the field analysis results dialogue.

  • The origin of the 3D radiation pattern can be set anywhere.
  • A scale factor has been added to change the relative size of the radiation pattern.
  • The number of colors can be changed.
  • The grouping of the dialogue box is now clearer.
  • A regular legend is now available which can be placed at the user's preferred location.
  • Different options are now available for the selection of desired underlay.
  • An export button has been added to write out the field values in .csv format.

Singula now has the ability to create fields by a wide range of point sources. This enables the creation of sources without modeling the feed precisely. Some of the representative sources are electric-dipole, magnetic-dipole and Gaussian. In addition, the fields can be modeled by any analytic function.

2D Enhancements

ELECTRO, KELVIN

Far tighter coupling between Electro and Kelvin now exists. As the temperature of the device changes, the electrical properties dependant on temperature will be updated.

ELECTRO, OERSTED, KELVIN

The ability to create transient boundary conditions and sources has been radically improved. Sources are now created in the source library and then assigned. The flow is identical to the way materials are created and assigned to the model. Transient sources can be defined by a set of signals which are added or multiplied to create quite complex sources. Each signal can be made of a free form curve, a set of predefined functions (such as “square wave”) or they can be defined by any standard intrinsic function such as ABS, COS, EXP, LN or so forth. The signals and their combinations are readily displayed graphically.

LORENTZ Enhancements

  • One of the new principal features is the ability to interpolate the fields for ray tracing. This has the potential to radically speed up the problem solution provided enough division is present for the interpolated field. This feature is advantageous for problems with a large number of rays.
  • Improvements in coupling surface and space charge distributions now enable better convergence for surface charge deposition.
  • Improved algorithms ensure the rays are assigned the correct energies when they intersect secondary emitters, reflectors and collectors.
  • In 3D, the new parallel computations will be very noticeable when a large number of rays require calculation.
  • The 2D program now includes meniscus plasma calculation.