What is a dielectric brick?

Geometry Elements - Dielectric Bricks

Although em is primarily a planar electromagnetic simulator, it also has the capability to add ”dielectric brick” material anywhere in your circuit. A dielectric brick is a solid volume of dielectric material embedded within a circuit layer. Dielectric bricks can be made from any dielectric material (including air) and can be placed in circuit layers made from any other dielectric material (including air). For example, dielectric bricks can be used to simulate structures such as a dielectric resonator block in an ”air” circuit layer, or an ”air hole” in a dielectric substrate circuit layer.

The default brick material is Air; this is defined for all the Project Editor files. All brick materials may be used on all levels and with different polygons on the same level. A brick material specifies the dielectric constant, loss tangent and bulk conductivity used by em, and whether the dielectric is isotropic or anisotropic. Since the dielectric parameters are unrelated to the level on which a polygon is located, changing the brick material of a polygon does not change the physical location of the polygon. It changes only the dielectric parameters.

Because a brick simulates a volume, it must be subsectioned in the X, Y and Z dimensions. The more subsections (finer resolution) used in each dimension, the more accurate the analysis. X/Y subsectioning of dielectric bricks is identical to X/Y subsectioning of metal polygons. You can control the X/Y subsectioning of both through your choice of grid size, XMIN, YMIN, XMAX, YMAX and subsections-per-wavelength.

Z subsectioning of dielectric bricks is controlled by the ”number of Z-partitions” parameter. This parameter specifies the number of Z subsections for all dielectric bricks on a particular dielectric layer. See the Z-Partitions dialog box for information on setting this parameter.

For a detailed discussion of dielectric bricks, see the "Dielectric Bricks" chapter in the Sonnet User's Guide. To view the manuals on your computer in PDF format, select Help => Manuals.