Products are evolving rapidly. There are no pure mechanical or electrical products any more. Increasingly, products combine hardware, software, sensing, connectivity and data. At the same time form factors are shrinking and becoming flexible. Product design and engineering teams have to ensure that the products meet ever increasing number of requirements before they can be shipped to customers. To make matters worse, these requirements are often conflicting. In order to meet this challenge, engineering teams need simulation tools provide accurate results in the shortest possible time and productivity tools that enable collaboration between teams. To address the challenges faced by our customers, Dassault Systemes and CST agreed to join forces to bring best in class structural and electromagnetic simulation technology on the 3DExperience platform. Our goal is to facilitate structural-electromagnetic co-design by providing best in class simulation, collaboration and productivity tools to help our users meet all design requirements while reducing overall time to market.

Three types of co-design methodologies are presented:

Concurrent Design: The structural design teams are tasked with ensuring comfort and reliability of a wearable device. The EM team needs to ensure seamless wireless connectivity. Here the structural and EM designs are performed in parallel by the respective teams. The 3DX platform is used to facilitate collaboration between the teams and perform multi-disciplinary optimization. We’ll describe this thru an example of a smart wrist band

Collaborative Design: The EM simulation uses results from a previously run structural simultion or vice versa. A flex cable model was used to demonstrate that sequential coupling between Abaqus and CST can be used to study the effects of mechanical deformation on electromagnetic aspects such as signal integrity and EMC. It is shown that structural deformation accounts for change in spacing between conducting layers by modeling the mechanical compression/elongation in dielectric layers. Whereas a simple geometric deformation always maintains uniform spacing between conducting layers and fails to account for the signal integrity or EMC issues that may arise from tight bending.

Integrated Multiphysics: Abaqus provides a Co-simulation framework to perform tightly coupled simulations between different structural and electromagnetic disciplines. We show how Abaqus and CST can together co-simulate the tightly coupled thermal-electromagnetic problem of induction heating.

Listen to the replay of the recent eSeminar on the topic "Structural – Electromagnetic Co-Design for Next Generation Electronic Devices" for more information.

Questions? Send your questions to harish.surendranath@3ds.com