Our Work Modeling Piezoelectric Crystals

Piezoelectric crystals are an important component in electronic appliances such as computers, cellular phones, and pagers. To be useful, these crystals must resonate in a particular vibrational mode at a specified frequency over a wide range of temperatures. Two major barriers prevent the accurate and timely modeling of these crystals. First, existing finite-element software packages (e.g., NASTRAN) are unable to accurately model the physical properties of piezoelectric systems. Second, the computational requirements of this problems are so large that engineers have considered its solution to be intractable on current sequential computers.

Extensive collaboration between Argonne National Laboratory and Motorola has resulted in the development of algorithms and software to overcome these two barriers. We have developed a new finite-element formulation of this problem that is capable of accurately modeling crystal behavior. To satisfy the computational requirements of the problem, we have developed scalable algorithms and software to harness the cost-efficient power of the Intel DELTA.