Introduction

FastFieldSolvers is born in the concept in the early 2000, from past experience gathered using two excellent tools for electromagnetic parasitic extraction of 3D geometries coded at M.I.T. and released in the public domain, FastHenry and FastCap.

Unfortunately, these solvers were available only in source form; this being not a problem for most of Unix environments, no simple way to use them in a Microsoft Windows environment was available. As common PC machines now reach speeds and memory capabilities more and more similar to their 'big brothers' workstation, we decided to port the whole lot also under Windows for using it. Then, beign quite satisfied of the result, we thought that the whole community of people dealing with this kind of problems could have appreciated our porting and decided to release it on the internet. However, simply distributing the software seemed not satisfactory to us, because we found out that many people (like us at the beginning), though interested to the topic, could have problems in preparing the input files (especially to get accurate results), to understand the results, to construct SPICE-like models for time-domain simulation of the structures.

One big advantage of codes like FastHenry and FastCap is that, beyond being free, the algorithms implemented are presented and discussed in a number of papers and scientific publications, so everybody can really trust the accuracy of the software. Therefore one has not to rely only on the declarations of the manufacturers that 'their xxx code is the best one and more accurate available', but the algorithm is proprietary in fact, so no one except them can tell if and in which situations the results could be poor. From FastHenry and FastCap, you can know exactly what you can get. However, the scientific papers usually are written by professionals for professionals and deals with technical aspects that an average user could have problems to understand, especially if his goal is, for example: 'how can I predict how my package will behave in respect to crosstalk between pins?'. In fact, with the increasing speed of signals being carried by packages, connectors and whatever else you can imagine to carry electromagnetic fields, many professionals, which in the past could ignore the stray effects of the 3D structures, feel the need to make first steps in this direction, urged by the fact that more and more often the expected performances were not fulfilled due to these problems. This was the exactly same spring that lead us on the topic three years ago.

Therefore, we decided to build a site where not only FastHenry and FastCap could be distributed, but also where could be found detailed informations useful for both students and professionals to understand the simulator results and the underlying physics, as well as practical examples of analysis of IC packages, connectors, sensors and other structures. Moreover, we are putting together a list of useful links to related topics and similar utilities to help you build and simulate 3D models.

We welcome your feedback, as well any comment, result related to the topic and contribution, as (but not limited to!) new links, results of your thesis work, references to scientific papers, any measurement you made on structures simulated with FastHenry and FastCap and images generated with these tools!