Re: Fasthenry program does much more than I originally thought

["Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>]

Original poster: "rob by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <rob-at-pythonemproject-dot-com>

Hi Terry,

I had some free time at work today and already have a working core of a
Python language preprocessor for fasthenry.  I'm calling it "fastTesla"
:)  

I was amused at some  assertions I saw that it wasn't possible to
accurately model inductors and capacitors.  The programs that do this
are full-wave EM type simulators, and unfortunately they cost about
$10000 per node license (e.g. Zeland Software and Ansofts HFSS).  If it
wasn't possible to accurately model inductors and capacitors, my company
would have been in Chapter 11 long ago.  We manufacture MMIC's, and our
biggest problem is modeling the nonlinear capacitances of the active
devices that are attached to the inductors.  Passive devices are no
problem.

That said, I applaud the work that is going on to develope some "free"
software that will do the same, or at least come close.  If you go to
www.sourceforge-dot-net and scan through the engineering/science listings of
software projects, you can see a lot of effort recently in making GPL'd
(i.e. free) CAD tools for electronic work.

Rob.

Tesla list wrote:
> 
> Original poster: "Terry Fritz" <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>
> 
> Hi Rob,
> 
> I just wanted to say that I am very interested in this!
> 
> I looked at the program and "i" could not figure it out yet, but I figure
> I'll wait a bit till you do and maybe get some example files going ;-))
> 
> Looking forward to seeing how we can use this program :-))
> 
> Cheers,
> 
>         Terry
> 
> At 09:00 PM 5/1/2002 -0700, you wrote:
> >I've been playing with the fasthenry program today, and I had no idea
> >that you could do so much with it.
> >
> >It will model inductors above a ground plane, model coupled inductors,
> >and generate impedance matrices.  Connections can be made to the ground
> >plane.
> >
> >In fact, the Unix version has a program that converts fasthenry output
> >into several types of Spice models.  There is also a provision to
> >generate current info for Matlab viewing.  And there is a program which
> >converts the input file into a Postscript picture.
> >
> >Here's the rub:  I'm modeling a coil with 8000 segments (50Mb of
> >memory).  You need a computer program to generate the input file.  This
> >weekend I will try hacking a Python program that might work for
> >coilers.  It might take a couple of weeks to do this, but I'll try.  I
> >already have the code for simple cylindrical coils.  I have compiled it
> >for Windows also with the MingW compiler.  If anyone wants it, email me.
> >
> >Rob.
> >--
> >-----------------------------
> >The Numeric Python EM Project
> >
> >www.pythonemproject-dot-com
> >

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