Wizards of Electromagnetism

In the white paper on EM simulator techniques mentioned in my previous post, the authors note:

Even more than for MoM- or FEM-based solvers, the popularity of FDTD-based solvers has been facilitated by recent advances in the speed and memory capacity of computer hardware. FDTD is an inherently parallel method and therefore lends itself very well to the processing capabilities of the most recent advances in CPU (general purpose processors) and GPU (graphics processors) hardware.

So perhaps its not a coincidence that EE Times has published an Viewpoint article Mass GPUs, not CPUs for EDA simulations by my colleague Larry Lerner, R&D senior manager at Agilent Technologies, EEsof EDA division. These accelerator chips, which started life as graphics co-processors, are branching out into EDA, not only for FDTD but also branch constitutive equation evaluation in SPICE circuit simulation.

Given that a computer configured with EDA software is valued in the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollar, the incremental cost of a couple of thousand dollars on an NVIDIA Tesla card is worthwhile, given the massive speed up and the value of getting the results early and often.