Much of the focus in the release of ANSYS 17.0 has been to improve an engineer’s productivity through improved workflows, performance and solvers. This will allow design teams to iterate their concepts faster, allowing for more robust products and faster time to market.
Although improvements have been made across the board in ANSYS 17.0, some of the most notable will be of great use to systems engineers and electronic designers.
New Electromagnetic Solver and ECAD Reader Will Improve PCB Development
“In 2016, we are releasing a patent-pending transient electronic solver that has at least 10 times improvement in speed,” said Todd McDevitt, marketing director at ANSYS. “The new solver is based on a time domain decomposition method.”
New Time Decomposition Method in ANSYS Maxwell speeds transient electromagnetic field simulations. (image courtesy of ANSYS).
Traditionally, ANSYS would break down large models into small domains that would then be solved by individual cores.
The new EM solver will decompose the problem based on time domains. Each time step is solved simultaneously on separate cores to cover the complete time history.
“ANSYS’ new technology to solve transient electromagnetic field simulations combined with SGI’s shared memory computing platform demonstrated a 30x speed improvement over the baseline simulation benchmark,” said Gabriel Broner, vice president at SGI.
Time Step Solution Magic?
Modelica Integration
ANSYS 17.0 also focuses on systems-level simulations by adding support for the Modelica modeling language. As a systems modeling standard, Modelica comes complete with a large library of 0D and 1D simulations for use in systems-level simulations.
These systems-level simulations typically include mechanical electronics, embedded software and hydraulics within one product. Due to the complexity of these products, the various subcomponents are modeled individually and then connected into a larger whole.
Although many subsystems have already been created and are available through libraries, engineers can also create their own. Additionally, because Modelica is a globally recognized standard, many systems simulation solvers will be able to handle your model.
These systems simulations are typically used early in the development cycle. Engineers add more detail to the model as the product develops. To that end, ANSYS 17.0 will allow engineers to reduce their 3D high-fidelity simulations to be incorporated into these systems-level models. This will ensure that the 3D results meet the requirements of the systems-level simulation.
Other improvements to ANSYS 17.0 include:
- Chip-package-system design workflow, including enhanced ability to model thermal behavior and structural fatigue of printed circuit boards to avoid delamination and solder cracking.
- Ribbon-style toolbar for CFD simulations
- Improved CFD meshing reduces time to results by 85 percent
- Better integration with SpaceClaim’s direct modeling tools for faster geometry fixes
- Finite element analysis scalability beyond 1,000 cores and CFD scalability beyond 129,000 cores
- Optimization to third-party high performance computing vendors
- Algorithmic improvements to domain decomposition
- Communication improvements between cores
- Improvements to sparse matrix and iterative solvers
- Calculation of a transient blade row configuration with only calculating one blade per row