IBM's method-of-moment based code was shown to solve extremely large, complex product-level packaging structures using the company's BlueGene Supercomputer server with greater than 85 percent efficiency. Researchers said problems with up to 1.3 million surface unknowns (translating to about 65 million volume unknowns for a finite-element technique) were also solved.

EMSurf was demonstrated recently at the Electronic and Components and Technology Conference, handling structures that comprise an entire critical system path without the need to subdivide the problem into the dozen or more smaller pieces required by commercially available modeling tools.

By analyzing system problems in a full model directly from CAD layout, the IBM researchers said digital system designers can avoid the loss of coupling effects that reduce accuracy. At the same time, they claimed the approach increased productivity, facilitated electrical system performance evaluations and reduced time-to-market for high-performance servers.

EMSurf is part of the IBM's Electromagnetic Field Solver Suite of Tools (EIP) used throughout IBM for over 20 years. The 13 codes that make up the suite were validated on a wide range of problems and have been used to generate electrical models for signal and noise integrity analyses for most of the IBM server products.

EMSurf uses advanced iterative and parallelization techniques developed at IBM Research. The EIP suite, including manuals and sample problems, has been released to the Alphaworks Web portal..