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Welcome to the MMTL homepage.

MMTL, the Multilayer Multiconductor Transmission Line 2-D and 2.5-D electromagnetic modeling tool suite, generates transmission parameters and SPICE models from descriptions of electronics interconnect dimensions and materials properties.

Description

MMTL programs and supporting libraries and documentation have been under development at the Mayo Clinic since the mid-1980s. The programs were developed under government sponsored electronics research programs in the Special Purpose Processor Development Group (SPPDG). They have been employed extensively at Mayo and distributed to some government agencies and research collaborators. At the beginning of 2004, we decided to release the TNT graphical front-end and MMTL programs as free software under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Technically, MMTL programs are in the class of 2-D and 2.5-D "field solvers", which convert dimensions and materials properties into electronic design parameters. The MMTL suite consists of several programs, including lossy, loss-free, quasi-static, and full-wave simulators. Circuit parameters are computed by either the method of moments (MOM) or finite element methods (FEM). Basic per-unit-length parameters are generated by the simulator, and can be converted into HSPICE W-element models. MMTL is similar in many ways to commercial field solver products which typically cost thousands of dollars. There are some free calculators, such as those from UltraCAD, but they rely on simplified formulas for specific cases, instead of generalized electromagnetic modeling. MMTL is implemented in C, C++, FORTRAN, sh, and Tcl/Tk, and has been deployed on HP-UX, Linux, Windows, Solaris, and Alpha/OSF1. Please visit the Sourceforge project page for details.