reference . ground plan in EM simulator and layout tools

Hi all,

I need comments from experts and the people who has worked on EM tools and layout tools
whats the criteria of choosing a referace plan in EM tools ..
and what is the referance plan does its definition differ from situation to situation
or differnt for different tools.

and please give a little explanation about ground plan .. i have idea about this but not in detail though I have just started working on EM and layout tools...

Thanks n regrads
gbaerf

The Reference plane or Port De-embedding:
The process of de-embedding removes the effects of the port discontinuities and feedlines from the results of the simulation.

For More details go through the AWR User guide documentation section
MWO/AO User Guide > Electromagnetic Analysis > 7.5 De-embedding

- The sidewalls in EMSight are perfect conductors; ie, ground. Unless you know the size of your final enclosure, you should keep plenty of space (ie, 2 or 3 x the substrate height) between the sidewalls and your conductors.

- For more accurate results, include 2 or 3 substrate heights of de-embedding length on your ports.

- If you use an EM structure in a schematic as a subcircuit, when you view the schematic's
layout, the EM structure's layout is truncated at the port reference planes - this way, what is laid out is exactly what was simulated.

The above details are for AWR EMSight EM simulator...

Similar observations applies to Sonnet EM Simulator..

---manju---

It is probably more theoretical than you want, but you can try checking my paper on de-embedding local grounds in the Feb. issue of MTT Transactions.

Also, the perfect ground reference provided by the perfectly conducting sidewalls in Sonnet and Emsight are critical in achieving very high accuracy results, especially with the local ground de-embedding described above. Determining port voltage by integrating a path through a substrate can at the very best support only moderate accuracy for inhomogeneous media like microstrip, and for all lossy cases where characterisitic impedance and wave number (2pi/lambda) are both complex.