A software-coupled 2D FDTD hardware accelerator [electromagnetic simulation]

The finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) technique is one of the methods of choice for complex electromagnetic simulations. However, the increasingly complex (and large) problems posed to FDTD software code can result in runtimes measured in days, even with multiprocessor supercomputers. Thus, the concept of accelerating FDTD by at least an order of magnitude, using special-purpose hardware, became an attractive research goal. Recently, the feasibility of such an approach has been reported in the literature. This contribution describes, for the first time, an accelerator that uses off-the-shelf hardware and achieves an order of magnitude acceleration in a large simulation that incorporates multiple, non-trivial materials and boundary conditions.