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MEFiSTo ver. 3.1
| What can you simulate in MEFiSTo? |
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What cannot be simulated in MEFiSTo |
MICs and MMICs
PCBs and other planar structures
Waveguide devices
Antennas
Various transitions like coax to microstrip or CPW
Closed and open structures
Packaging
Realistic metallization thickness and resistivity effects, superconductors
Circuit (Spice) models of devices included in field simulations
Lossy and frequency dependent materials
Anisotropic and Negative index materials
RF heating
SAR for cell-phones etc.
Signal integrity and EMC problems
Ultra Wide Band applications
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Radar cross section, RCS
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Intro
MEFiSTo (Multipurpose Electromagnetic Field Simulation Tool) is a
Transmission Lines Method, or TLM, 3D time domain electromagnetic solver that is ideal
analyzing complicated structures.
Amplifiers, high-speed transistors, other devices can be included as spice equivalent circuits in the electromagnetic
simulations.
All the parameters can be expressed as variables and used in repeated, batch processes, optimizations,
nonlinear problems, user defined sources, etc.
MEFiSTo can be run from Matlab with various parameters inside an optimization procedure, and also
can include Matlab functions in simulations instead of equivalent circuits.
MEFiSTo takes advantage of your hardware by fully using multiprocessor configurations or 64 bit processors.
Also for fast pre-design include a 2D version and tutorials on the mapping of microstrip and waveguide structures
into 2D structures for quick results.
Unique features:
Time domain radiation pattern calculations.
Negative index materials (metamaterials) - MEFiSTo is the only commercially available tool that can include metamaterials
in simulations.
Inclusion of equivalent circuits in EM simulations.
Preprocessor
You can define 3D structures very easily in MEFiSTo. There are predefined shapes like rectangular boxes, circular and
elliptical cylinders, and you can define arbitrary polygonal surfaces that can be extruded in the third dimension.
Objects can be inserted totally or partially into other objects, creating various structures. All this can be done
in the graphical interface or can be done in a text file that describes the structure.
All parameters, dimensions and material constants can be defined as variables.
Solver
There are three different solvers included.
A 2D EM solver, a 3D EM solver and a thermal solver.
Postprocessor
MEFiSTo calculates and represents in 3D the electric and magnetic field distributions,
plots the frequency dependence of the S parameters, frequency and time domain probe fields, radiation patterns, etc.
Examples
Coaxial to microstrip transition, electric field vectors.

Coaxial to microstrip transition, electric field magnitude.
Horn antenna radiation pattern and electric field distribution.
Comparison with FDTD
It is well known that the FDTD algorithm gives phase errors, not only that but also the phase error is
direction dependent - more exactly with respect to the grid axes. The dispersion error is the dominant error in the
discretized approximation of a continuous structure.
Advanced TLM schemes like those used by MEFiSTo are much less dispersive, including a much smaller angular dependence.
To illustrate this consider a very simple 2D example of a oscillating line source (point source in 2D) in an uniform medium.
The waves (phase lines) should be perfectly circular. You can see in the figure on the left that the FDTD simulation gives a distorted solution
(almost square phase lines) due to the different phase error along different directions.
The TLM simulation with the same grid step gives a much more accurate solution, as illustrated on the right side.
More MEFiSTo examples on next page --->
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