View From the Top - Nullspace, Inc.
Microwave Product Digest
VFTT Interview with Dr. Masha V. Petrova, CEO and co-founder of Nullspace, Inc.
MPD: In the last few years, two markets—fixed wireless access and “commercial space”—have created significant opportunities for the RF and microwave industry. Please describe your efforts if your company participates in one or both of these applications.
MP:
The world is more connected than it’s ever been. Engineers developing RF technologies are tasked with increasingly challenging design projects. They are required to work faster, be more innovative, and more agile than ever before.
Yet, there is a problem. Legacy simulation tools that engineers use to develop new RF technologies are stuck in the past. AI, digital twins, GPUs, etc. hold a lot of promise, but not many of these novel technologies have yet become the reliable “workhorse” tools that engineers can use with confidence in their design process.
Engineering simulation software has been relied on by engineering teams for decades to virtually test product designs in order to minimize costly physical prototyping. It is not trivial to develop software that reliably and accurately predicts complex physical phenomena. Developing electromagnetics (EM) simulation solvers requires PhD-level knowledge of modern software engineering, advanced linear algebra, EM phenomenology, and years of experience with physical RF systems.
One of the reasons why there are only a handful of full-wave EM solvers available is that engineering simulation requires extensive validation on actual physical hardware before it can become a reliable tool for engineers, who are developing everything from electronic warfare technologies to MRI machines.
Over the last 30 to 40 years, several EM simulation leaders have emerged in the industry. Ansys, Altair, Cadence, and Dassault Systems have been those trusted go-to providers of simulation software. These companies have been developing and selling commercial EM tools that engineers could safely rely on, without the need to look for alternatives.
This has been the case for decades. A safe way for these companies to assure this kind of reliability is to acquire solvers that have been extensively validated against experimental data and then not alter the solver codebase. So these companies offer suites of tools made up of acquired solvers to address various simulation needs. But most of those solvers are 30 to 40 years old. They were developed before modern parallel computing architecture existed.
2024 marked the year of unprecedented software acquisitions in the world of electronics. Companies that engineers relied on for decades – Ansys, Altair, Altium – all were acquired for very large revenue multiples, signifying a rapidly growing need for reliable electronics design software.
With the emergence of electromagnetic spectrum warfare, defense companies developing RF systems are strongly encouraged to pivot towards domestic software tools for highly sensitive projects. There are not a lot of “made in the USA” alternatives for reliable EM simulation tools.
These are just some of the factors that have opened the door to opportunities for engineers to start looking for alternative simulation tools. The well-known legacy tools are not going away anytime soon. But the landscape has significantly changed this year. Companies should seize this moment to look at alternative simulation options, and allocate dedicated time and resources to their engineering teams for evaluation of new software tools. In 2 to 3 years, they will be way ahead of companies who do not recognize just how significantly the engineering software landscape has changed in 2024.
