Simbeor
CommentsCreated Thursday 09 March 2023
Background Information
Simbeor can be accessed at https://www.simberian.com/. It's an absolutely phenomenal tool that can be used for pre- and post-layout SI work. Key to its success is the "decompositional electromagnetic" philosophy that it uses [1].
Use Cases
Simbeor is excellent for the following:
- Stackup design
- Transmission line design
- Via and component breakout design
- Generating pre-layout constraints
- S-parameter visualization and post-processing
Tutorial
Check out this introduction video on Simbeor usage:
More info to come - reach out if you have specific requests for features you would like to see in Simbeor.
Limitations
While Simbeor is an incredible tool, useful for many tasks and well worth the license cost (many times over), there are a few areas where it falls short of a full system SI/PI tool. For example:
- Broadband spice models have seen some inconsistency compared to Touchstone outputs
- This doesn't have hard data, but has been seen in a few cases with default RCM settings. More work should be done to investigate optimal settings to ensure a good match to Touchstone data
- Post-layout extraction of PDN nets is not feasible
- IBIS and IBIS-AMI are not supported for time-domain simulations
- Due to the decompositional philosophy, crosstalk is not easily captured when simulating large busses of signals, especially via fields
References
Backlinks:
High Speed Design Wiki:Glossary:W-Element Model
High Speed Design Wiki:Signal Integrity:Transmission Lines:Effect of Loss Tangent on Characteristic Impedance
Contact Stephen with any questions: Stephen@ShieldDigitalDesign.com
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