Parallel electromagnetic modeling of 3D microstrip discontinuities using FEM and PML

An approach is developed for 3D microstrip discontinuities using the finite element method (FEM) and the perfectly matched layers (PML). It is shown that iterative solvers are not suitable for this problem since the matrix equations from the PML-used FEM modeling are rather ill-conditioned and lead to a very slow or nonconvergent result. A newly developed package SuperLU of the sparse LU decomposition solver is incorporated into our developed approach running on a PC-based parallel platform. Various implementation techniques are detailed. Numerical experiments clearly show that the developed approach is reliable, efficient, and suitable for modeling 3D microstrip discontinuities.