FFT-PEEC: A Fast Tool From CAD to Power Electronics Simulations

A fast and general partial element equivalent circuit (PEEC) method based on the fast Fourier transform (FFT) is proposed for the first time. The numerical tool only requires common CAD data input files (e.g.,.stl format), then the discretization process is performed automatically by means of a fast voxelization technique based on ray intersection, thus, drastically reducing the human effort required to setup the model. The method allows for considering at the same time inductive and capacitive effects, and is focused on power electronics applications where propagation effects can be neglected, whereas all the other electromagnetic phenomena are considered. Specifically, the proposed method is particularly suited for problems where both electric and magnetic fields are equally important and, therefore, quasistatic approximations do not apply. An ad-hoc preconditioner which significantly speeds-up the solver is also proposed and, thanks to the FFT, both memory and computation time are significantly reduced, without the need of applying data compression. Both linear and nonlinear materials are considered by the proposed FFT-PEEC method. Sample implementation of the method is made publicly available.