Graduate student Bangda Zhou receives Best Paper Award from the chip-package co-design session of TECHCON 2014 conference held September 7-9, 2014 in Austin, TX. Existing fast full-wave solvers for solving large-scale problems are, in general, iterative solvers since traditional direct solvers are computationally expensive. Bangda Zhou and Professor Dan Jiao’s paper presents the first direct finite-element solver of linear (optimal) complexity to address the challenges encountered in large-scale high-speed integrated circuits and package design. This direct solver has successfully analyzed an industry product-level full package problem involving over 15.8 million unknowns in less than 1.6 hours on a single core running at 3 GHz. Comparisons with the state-of-the-art finite element methods that employ the most advanced direct sparse solvers, and a widely used commercial iterative finite element solver, have demonstrated the clear advantages of the proposed linear-complexity direct solver in computational efficiency.

TECHCON is the annual research conference held by Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC). The technical papers selected represent a summary of the best research in SRC’s portfolio across all SRC's research programs. Papers are divided into sessions organized around technical areas of particular interest to SRC membership. Best Paper in Session awards are selected based on technical content, perceived value, technology transfer, and presentation.