InductEx Superconductive Circuit Inductance Extraction Tool Now Substantially Faster

 

March 25, 2015 (HP93).  The InductEx software creates three-dimensional models from integrated circuit layouts, and can extract multi-terminal inductance networks that include coupling.  It is developed at Stellenbosch University in South Africa.  A powerfully improved FastHenry engine with multithreading support makes InductEx v5, released on 14 March 2015, between 100 and 500 times faster than its version 4 on quad-core computers when calculation models are large (50,000 segments or more). A new tetrahedral meshing engine is also under development, and will be included in version 5.1 starting June 2015.

 

InductEx makes inductance extraction possible when layouts have multiple ground and sky planes, holes in ground and sky plane layers and stacked vias that connect layers above and below a ground plane. With version 5, such extraction now becomes comfortable for large models, such as the eSFQ T flip-flop depicted in Figure 1. For this example, with 21 inductors, 17 ports and 44,000 segments, InductEx v5 solves the entire network in 140 seconds on a quad-core Intel i7. This is 435 times faster than the 61,300 seconds needed by InductEx v4 on the same CPU.

 

 

 

Fig. 1.  Example of 3D model of eSFQ T flip-flop created by InductEx version 5.

 

The InductEx website is www.inductex.info, where modelling examples and more information on the software can be found.