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Latest Version

SimWorks Finite Difference Solutions

v3.0.0 Key Updates
    Support for Topology-Based Inverse Design Optimization

    Inverse design now supports a more flexible topology optimization method. It liberates users from dependence on predefined geometries. By simply specifying a design region and available materials, the algorithm automatically explores the optimal material distribution within that space, ultimately generating high-performance designs with structures that may far exceed traditional expectations.

    Support for MATLAB API Calls

    The software provides MATLAB API functionality, allowing users to deeply interact with the SimWorks Finite Difference Solutions simulation software by writing MATLAB scripts or programs.

    New Planar Solid Structure

    Support is added for the Planar Solid structure, which resembles a polygon structure extruded into three-dimensional space. Users can directly construct solid models of arbitrary shapes by defining vertices and facets. This fundamentally simplifies the creation process for complex 3D components. Users no longer need to manually combine multiple basic structures (like blocks and cylinders) and tediously set the mesh order for their overlapping parts, thereby significantly improving modeling efficiency and accuracy.

Focus On

SimWorks Finite Difference Solutions

With the rapid development of high-performance computing technology, computational electromagnetics has made significant progress, making it possible to numerically solve complex electromagnetic field problems using computers. SimWorks timely introduced Finite Difference Solutions, a software with an intuitive interface that creates virtual experiments, reproduces complex micro-nano optoelectronic phenomena, predicts unknown optoelectronic behaviors, analyzes and optimizes complex structures or materials, and provides users with a complete professional numerical solution for optoelectronic problems.

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FDTD

SimWorks FDTD is a powerful tool for researchers and engineers to handle various micro-nano optoelectronic problems.

FDFD

SimWorks FDFD is a powerful tool for analyzing the spectrum of resonant cavities and metal antennas.

FDE

SimWorks FDE is a powerful tool for solving large-scale integrated planar optical waveguides, long-distance transmission devices, and various new fiber optic problems.

FDCharge

SimWorks FD Charge Transport Solver is a powerful tool for researchers and engineers to simulate the electrical behavior of semiconductor devices.

Cloud Computing

Pay-per-use, private deployment, providing 24/7 uninterrupted service

Parallel Mode

Supports various parallel solutions including GPU, MPI, OpenMPI, CUDA

System

Compatible with three major operating systems: Windows, Linux, and macOS

Computing Speed

Simulation computing speed is about 50% higher than other mainstream products in the industry

Computational Accuracy

The computational accuracy of the product solver is completely consistent with world-class software levels

Software Features

Software Functionality/Performance

SimWorks deeply applies GPU acceleration technology, fully leveraging the performance advantages of hardware and significantly enhancing the simulation speed. In typical optical simulation scenarios, accelerated computing solutions based on mainstream GPU architectures demonstrate performance far exceeding that of traditional CPUs. SimWorks provides comparative test data of CPU and GPU simulation speeds, which can help users evaluate and select the computing resource configuration that suits their own needs, achieving the optimal balance between performance and cost. In addition, SimWorks also supports multi-GPU parallel computing, allowing multiple Gpus to be scheduled to work collaboratively in a single simulation task. Compared with single-card computing, multi-card parallelism not only doubles the computing speed but also expands the video memory capacity, supporting larger-scale simulation. Whether it is a single-machine multi-card configuration or a multi-machine multi-card cluster, SimWorks can fully utilize multi-GPU resources to achieve more efficient computing and meet the needs of simulation tasks of different scales.The following comparison chart illustrates the acceleration effect of a single GPU over a CPU server (Chart 1), as well as the further speed improvement of multi-GPU parallelism over a single GPU (Chart 2).

When the FDTD solver runs on NVIDIA GPUs, it now supports half-precision (FP16) computation. Compared to single-precision (FP32), FP16 significantly reduces memory usage and improves computational efficiency. Arithmetic FP16 operations only supported on arch greater than 5.3 (NVIDIA GeForce GTX 10 series (Pascal architecture) or newer GPUs). The numerical range and precision of FP16 are much smaller than FP32, so do not use it in projects with large energy or nonlinearity. For more details, please refer to Advanced. For example, on an NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPU, where the theoretical FP16 performance is twice that of FP32, using FP16 in actual FDTD simulations achieves approximately 35% faster computation (Chart 3) and 30% lower memory usage (Chart 4) compared to FP32. The detailed comparison is shown below.

Chart 1 Single GPU acceleration compared to CPU server acceleration effect
Chart 2 Multi-GPU parallel relative to single GPU further speed up
Chart 3 FP16 compared to FP32 speed up
Chart 4 FP16 compared to FP32 memory reduction