Who needs CES when you can see Maxwell's equations rendered in 3-D?

Three-dimensional technology is undoubtedly dominating this week’s Consumer Electronics Show, based on the cover story of USA Today’s Money section. Also, nVIDIA is likely to have a significant presence at CES, but I don’t know. I’ll leave it to my colleague Brian Dipert to track down, now that he has pried himself away from the leather chairs, power plugs, and USB power ports at the San Jose airport and made his way to Las Vegas.

Meanwhile, the really cool action is at nVIDIA’s Santa Clara headquarters, where Agilent and nVIDIA engineers are demonstrating the use of nVIDIA graphics processing units to accelerate simulations in the Agilent ADS (Advanced Design System) EDA platform and render the results in 3-D. Hany Fahmy, director of SIE/EMC compliance and regulatory engineering at nVIDIA, described the use of ADS to assist in the design of EMI/RFI-compliant graphics boards. Those boards, in turn, can be used to cut some ADS simulation times from weeks to days or hours or enable simulations that simply wouldn’t be possible on general-purpose CPUs, according to Darin Phelps, sales engineer at Agilent’s EEsof EDA division.

Fahmy said that without such capability, problems might not be found until a board is tested in a chamber, when expensive fixes might be required. He said the 3-D capability is valuable in giving designers insight into the performance of their boards, enabling them to implement compliant boards the first time.

Agilent says its stereo 3-D viewer capability for the ADS Momentum G2 Element and FEM Element electromagnetic (EM) simulators consists of a support download that enhances ADS 2009 Update 1. The capability requires a computer equipped with an nVIDIA Quadro FX 3800 or higher professional graphics processor, nVIDIA 3-D Vision stereoscopic glasses, and a 3-D vision ready 120-Hz display.

Not only does the nVIDIA approach boost simulation performance–it saves power as well. EDN technical editor Paul Rako, who saw the demo last week, has more. See “nVIDIA co-processing reduces power use by an order of magnitude.” He will be elaborating further in an upcoming cover story on simulation.