Overview
Material Overview #
The software provides two material libraries. Both are opened from the Materials group on the Home tab:
- Optical Material Library (Optical Materials): used by optical solvers such as FDTD, FDFD, FDE, EME, and RCWA to describe optical properties including refractive index, dispersion, and nonlinearity.
- Electrical Material Library (Electrical Materials): used only by the FDCharge solver, and includes three material types: conductor, insulator, and semiconductor.
The two material libraries cannot be mixed.
Optical Material #
This section describes optical materials.
The optical material library includes some built-in materials and allows users to define custom materials. This section describes the library interface, material fitting, and assigning materials to structures, and also provides detailed introductions to dielectric, (n, k), conductive, Debye/Drude/Lorentz, nonlinear, sampled-data, and graphene materials.
Electrical Material #
This section describes electrical materials.
It includes commonly used built-in electrical materials that can be used directly in simulation. Users can also define custom electrical materials and add them to the library. Materials fall into three types: conductor, insulator, and semiconductor.