Triangular Prism Element Optimization for Mesh Visualization of Printed Circuit Boards

摘要

Prism elements arise in some printed circuit board modeling contexts, such as visualization and electromagnetic field modeling. Here we consider prisms built by extruding from triangular bases which result from constrained 2d Delaunay triangulation. The goal is to partition each extruded prism into sub-prisms of high quality that fit within the given printed circuit board layers. A prism quality measure is introduced and, from it, optimal prism height is derived given a triangular base. Given a printed circuit board's layer heights and optimal prism heights, we provide a method for determining the height of each prism element. The overall prism mesh quality is evaluated, which examines the tradeoff of prism element quality versus the number of elements. The new method also compares favorably with respect to a prior prism mesh generation method that does not involve optimizing prism heights.