Ansoft HFSS or ADS Momentum

Hi guys,

Between these two EM softwares, which one is better?. maybe in terms of complexity, accuracy, technical support, price, advantages, etc. I want to use it for spiral inductor simulation.


Thanks.

Hi

For spiral inductor Momentum should be more efficient, it is designed for layered media like the one use in your case. HFSS is also excellent program but with much wider area of use - general 3D structures like waveguides, antennas, scatteres etc.

flyhigh

HFSS is the industry standard for em software. It can do anything. Unfortunately it is very expensive and not so user friendly. Momentum has very limited capabilities, but is probably 1/7th the price.

Another thing to note, thick metal computations are very inefficient in MoM as its preferred setting is infinitely thin sheets and Spiral Inductor simulations demand an accurate representation of the capacitive parasitics of the facing edges of the spiral along with accurate knowledge of the losses of the spiral for Q computations. HFSS does this very well and efficiently.

Yes, probably HFSS is more expensive compared to Momentum. Regarding Momentum, does anybody know how to create a parameterized layout of spiral inductor?. It seems like by default Momentum layout only offers asymmetrical spiral inductor layout (square and round). I need to generate various type of spiral structures like octagonal, stacked, symmetrical and spiral inductor with centre tap.

Thanks

To go off-roading HFSS is the usual choice. But, it can be painful (expensive, not necessarily user-friendly). We all know expensive, hard to use tools are generally pretty good.

HFSS handles parametric models easily. I rarely build one that is not parametric.