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The Capacitance Extraction Interface

The interface uses an external program to extract capacitance values between conducting features in the layout. The interface supports the following capacitance extraction programs:

  1. The FasterCap program from FastFieldSolvers.com. This commercial program is recommended for users with capacitance extraction as an important workflow element. The auto-refinement capability provides the best accuracy with the least amount of setup.

  2. The FastCap program from Whiteley Research. The interface also provides a crude, linear panel refinement capability which can be used with this free version of FastCap, which is available from the Whiteley Research free software archive. We will refer to the Whiteley Research program as FastCap-WR to distinguish it from the MIT original.

The interface generates a unified list file, which is compatible with the programs listed above. It is not directly compatible with the original MIT FastCap program, or its derivatives, that require multiple input files. There are accessory programs lstpack and lstunpack available which convert between the formats, so the MIT FastCap can be used in a two-step flow involving unpacking.

This is the second generation capacitance extraction interface. The original capacitance extraction interface, found in releases 4.0.8 and earlier, was quite a bit more complicated. The present interface affords at least the following simplifications:

The new interface, however, is much more flexible and powerful than the original interface.



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Stephen R. Whiteley 2024-09-29