HFSS 3D Component Webinar

I'll make myself the presenter, and then as soon as I get going on the record, can you just start the recording? Sure. Which bunny is it?

So, at the top of the user interface for GoToWebinar, there's a button under the big play button called "Start Recording." Now, you think you unchecked it or something? I unchecked it, but you should be able to just hit it, right? Just a second to start it. Was it there?

And then you uncheck that button, and it's gone. Today's topic is "3D Components in HFSS." The plan is to go through a brief introduction of this nice feature and follow up with a quick demo, which will take about 20 to 30 minutes. So, what is a 3D component?

Let's take a look at, say, this Apple Watch. If we explode it up into detail views, it is assembled by numerous different little components: batteries, screens, chips, IOCs, and so on. From the engineering perspective, we need to design and simulate each of those components.

Most of the time, it's done by various groups or different companies or vendors. So, how do we efficiently pass the information of these components? We can use this new capability in ANSYS Electronic Desktop called "3D Component." This 3D component has a .a3dcomp file extension.

It can be saved and reused for later. It can help you share with partners, vendors, and colleagues.

It contains geometries, material properties, boundary conditions, excitations, and IP protection, meaning that it could be encrypted with a password so that when you pass it on to your customer, they will only see your component as a black box.

For example, Internet of Things are being very popular nowadays. Let's take an example of a chip antenna. We want to know what's inside. Inside the chip and what is the antenna. Simply put, an antenna is just the layout routing plus the chip antenna at this location, at the end of the routing.

So when we try to simulate a chip antenna, we don't want to reveal what's really inside the chip antenna because of IP purposes. But we do want them to know the performance and the characteristic of our antenna to make a good chip.

So we can use our 3D component capability to pass it to our customer. The encryption capability of the 3D components is often used in antenna industries.

So the original antenna simulation model, by using this 3D component capability, the geometry can be maintained, but the geometry may contain some sensitive IP that may make it difficult or undesirable to share with others.

So with the encrypted model, it will still remain the full fidelity of the original model, encapsulated and encrypted, and still maintains visibility of the geometry and fields defined by the original model creator.

It has a full 3D electromagnetic simulation done on it already before you pass it on. Once you pass the antenna on, you can install the antenna on the antenna pole. And with everything being said, it still maintains accuracy and details of the original component but without exposing sensitive IP.

Let me show you a little example of what I meant. Right now, I'm showing a side view mirror on a car. It is a 3D component already. I will start from the beginning, from the import. Here, I can insert a new HF-Assist design. Under control, there's a 3D component library.

You can browse it to where the 3D component is sitting at. Click import and exit. Upon importing, it will give you a list of the parameters in this 3D component, as well as the image of the 3D component with info. Now, I have imported this 3D component. Let's take a look at what's inside.

This project contains this 3D component. It has an excitation here: a lumped port with an antenna within the p 5. Here, there's the PCB representation. And the mirror and the internal and the body of the side view. Let me switch to a 3D view. Now, we can simulate this.

This antenna is supposed to be tuned at 0.8 gigahertz. Let's see if we take a look at the S1 parameter. We see a nice S11 plot, peak performance is approximately at 0.8 gigahertz, which is good.

We can also plot the total 3D total gain of a 3D polar plot as well as the direction of the antenna performance. By looking at these plots, it's not very straightforward. We can plot this upon our 3D geometry by doing so.

We just click on overlay visibility and can see that the antenna is performing. We can see that the antenna's performance. We can also put this 3D polar plot here as well. So this will tell us how the antenna performs with everything being all set.

We can further add this side view mirror to a full car model and can see that the antenna is performing very well. So far, I've shown you how to import a 3D component. On the other hand, how do we create a 3D component? It's also very easy.

For example, if we were to make a 3D component out of this entire geometry, all we need to do is select all the components you like and go to the same drop-down menu, Draw, 3D Component-like, and then select the 3D component.

Now, we can give a description and take a look at the three Points node by proved units here.

Let's go to, and we now have what we want to call here as a "side view mirror." Because instead of having just one antenna, we can say something like "front" and "back." Let's call the one that we affected on the other side of the architecture "back." Another example—that we may have edited the virtual reality of both Rational and Vector strategies to view the result we can actually get from relaxing our condition response to use an STAHL layer as a reference entirely.

Let's say that we've overlaid our 3D component tracking data to the full model. So because we want to animate its dimensions as time, we can put the line "Animate dimensions as time" here. Let's create another HFSS instance. Let's say we want to import something from here.

Let's take the same side view mirror. Well, that's already a 3D component. Let's take a separate CAD just to see... Okay. Let's say we take this... Okay then. So let's take this side view mirror. We can do that. Or we can do this. We can make a random geometry.

Let's say this is the component we would like to reuse time over time. Then we can create a 3D component upon this. Or that we can maybe we can set an excitation, say, on a surface. Say, there's a wake port here. Maybe we can create an air box. Then we can give boundary conditions on this air box.

Let's say this is the component we'd like to create. Now, we create a 3D component with a model that's a cylinder. And there's an air box boundary. There's a radiation boundary on the air box. Wake port on the top of the cylinder. No hybrid region. No mesh operations.

Just one coordinate system that's global. No parameters. Encryption. We can give an encryption here. We can set a password. Let's say one. And then we can create a 3D component. One. And we can allow whether the component to be able to be added. It could be either never or with a user password.

That's up to you. So the first password, the upper password, allows the use. The lower password allows the added. So let's say we don't need. Let's say we set them to be the same. There are just one. And licensing. We don't need any licensing information here. And the image is just a box.

And now we save it, let's say on here. And then we can create a 3D component. Okay. Now we can create a new HFSS just to import this 3D component. Okay. It requires a password to use it. Remember we set it to be one. Okay. Now it's imported here under 3D components. It's here.

And if it allows it, we can add a definition, which means we can always add it to a 3D component. We set a password to be one. So a separate project opens up, allowing you to add it, your 3D component.

So this is a nice and simple way, a nice and neat feature, allowing vendors, suppliers, and customers to pass their designs without revealing any IPs. In the industries, people use this function a lot, and we highly recommend and advocate these features to our customers.

This is all I have for today. If you have any questions, I'll leave five minutes for you to raise questions. You can put that in chat or the question section here, or if you have questions later, you can send an email to support at ozoninc.com.