Newbie question about electric field solving on PCB

[dään]

Dear Elmer Community,

I'm an electronic design engineer and have to deal with ever increasing frequencies of the digital communication channels for my PCB designs. You can get quite far here with rules of thumb, approximations and a disciplined approach, but to truly explore the design space, you can't avoid simulation using a field solver. And this is where Elmer could - hopefully - come into play and eliminate the guesswork.

Here's what I'd ultimately like to achieve: Extracting the S-Parameters of a single-ended trace on a PCB. Single-ended because I assume that it's "easier" to start with (later I'd definitely need to simulate differential pairs), and S-Parameters because this would be the "natural" format to feed into other tools for further analysis (like plotting the characteristic impedance, simulate the bit error rate, etc). Parallel to the simulation, my plan would be to verify the results using a VNA with a real PCB (the VNA's output would also be S-Parameters).

Now to my question: Has anyone ever done something like this with Elmer and/or would be willing to help me get started? I have a strong background in programming, so it should be possible for me to fill in the gaps between the steps like transforming input/output data, automation, etc.

I look forward to exchanging ideas with you.

Best regards,
Daniel

[kevinarden]

You can search this forum for PCB, there have been PCB models discussed.