Palace: 3D Finite Element Solver for Computational Electromagnetics

Palace, for PArallel LArge-scale Computational Electromagnetics, is an open-source, parallel finite element code for full-wave 3D electromagnetic simulations in the frequency or time domain, using the MFEM finite element discretization library.

Key features:

• Eigenmode calculations with optional material or radiative loss including lumped impedance boundaries. Automatic postprocessing of energy-participation ratios (EPRs) for circuit quantization and interface or bulk participation ratios for predicting dielectric loss.
• Frequency domain driven simulations with surface current excitation and lumped or numeric wave port boundaries. Wideband frequency response calculation using uniform frequency space sampling or an adaptive fast frequency sweep algorithm.
• Explicit or fully-implicit time domain solver for transient electromagnetic analysis.
• Lumped capacitance and inductance matrix extraction via electrostatic and magnetostatic problem formulations.
• Support for a wide range of mesh file formats for structured and unstructured meshes, with built-in uniform or region-based parallel mesh refinement.
• Arbitrary high-order finite element spaces and curvilinear mesh support thanks to the MFEM library.
• Scalable algorithms for the solution of linear systems of equations, including geometric multigrid (GMG), parallel sparse direct solvers, and algebraic multigrid (AMG) preconditioners, for fast performance on platforms ranging from laptops to HPC systems.

Crosstalk Between Coplanar Waveguides Example: Views of the mesh boundaries for these two configurations are shown below. In both cases the computational domain is discretized using an unstructured tetrahedral mesh.