EM Software & Systems-S.A. (Pty) Ltd is proud to announce the release of FEKO Suite 7.0. FEKO users can find more detail in the FEKO Suite 7.0 download area or consult the release notes which can be found in the FEKO Suite 7.0 installation directory. The main features of this release include: FDTD method Finite difference time domain (FDTD) solver A new finite difference time domain (FDTD) solver was added to FEKO's comprehensive set of computational methods. Despite the fact that the method is set in the time domain, the use of Fourier techniques allows wide-band frequency domain information to be calculated. It can achieve second order accuracy using first order numeric differentiation. The method is also well suited to modelling inhomogeneous materials. In addition, the method lends itself well to various parallelisation techniques. The FDTD solver supports GPU computing to improve performance when a compatible GPU is available to obtain significant speedup. Watch a video demonstration on how the FDTD may be applied to solve a four port microstrip coupler on a finite substrate. Voxel mesh Voxel mesh engine A new voxel mesh engine was developed to allow models to be discretised into voxel elements for the FDTD solver. The voxel mesh engine supports non-uniform voxel meshing of geometry and mesh parts. Automatic mesh settings can be used to generate voxel meshes with a standard or coarse mesh in addition to specify the mesh size manually. The automatic mesh sizes are calculated by taking the simulation frequency range, material properties and time signals into account. Hybrid MoM/MLFMM with PO/LE-PO Hybrid MLFMM with PO or LE-PO A new hybrid iterative method is supported which allows MLFMM with either PO or LE-PO to be used in the same model. An advantage of this iterative technique is a significant reduction in memory. The MLFMM models the complex part of the structure which contains the fine details. The PO/LE-PO is used to model the smoothly varying part. When using LE-PO together with the MLFMM, bi-directional coupling is included. Importing Gerber, ODB++ and 3Di models Formats encountered in the industry describing PCB models such as Gerber, ODB++ and 3Di, are now supported in CADFEKO (Windows only). PCB model1PCB model2 Application automation and Lua scripting The API was extended to allow characteristic mode results to be accessed via the scripting interface. Stored result entities can now be controlled from the scripting environment. The Matrix and ComplexMatrix objects were extended to allow sub-matrices within a large matrix to be extracted or inserted. Efficient fast Fourier transform and inverse fast Fourier transforms were added to the Matrix and ComplexMatrix objects.