Python GUI for gds2palace

Install

pip install setupEM

Full documentation, installation guide, and usage walkthrough: https://github.com/VolkerMuehlhaus/setupEM

Recent changes

What's New - October 17, 2026

Conductor model replaces Conductor meshing on the Mesh and Boundaries tab (Palace only), with a third choice: Surface impedance (default, as before), Solve inside (volume mesh) and the new Solve inside + skin layers, which adds thin layers along the conductor faces for accurate Q and loss at high frequency. Generated model scripts now use settings['conductor_model'] instead of settings['filled_metals']. Older projects and model scripts with filled_metals still load. setupEM now requires gds2palace 0.9.0 or later; pip install --upgrade setupEM updates it.

What's New - October 16, 2026

Boundary conditions per side: Advanced... next to Boundary conditions on the Mesh and Boundaries tab opens a table with the six sides of the simulation box. Each side can have its own boundary condition (Absorbing, PEC or PMC) and air layer thickness; a blank entry uses the value from the tab. For example, PEC at zmin with 0 µm air models a backside ground plane at the box boundary. This replaces the "same on all sides / different per side" choice for the air layer, which now lives in the same table.

Loading a model with different boundary conditions per side no longer changes it to one condition for all sides: before, a single PEC side turned all six sides into PEC.

Stackup Editor: while the stackup has errors, the cross-section preview can't be redrawn and keeps the last valid drawing. It is now marked as not up to date: dimmed, crossed by a thin red line, with a banner above it. Show errors in the banner opens the editor's XML Preview tab, which lists the errors. The status line now points there too, instead of to Save.

What's New - October 12, 2026

3D Field Viewer: value markers. Check Probe in the View box (or press P), then click the model to place a numbered marker with the field value at that exact point. Clicking works from any angle, on the full model, the clipped solid, its cut face or the 2D plane only section; dragging still rotates. Markers are drawn on top of the model, so a marker on a buried body stays visible. A Markers list opens beside the view with the marker number, value and x / y / z in µm, plus Remove, Clear and Copy (tab-separated, for spreadsheets). For Elmer thermal temperatures, a dropdown switches the list and labels between K, °C and ΔT (rise above the lowest temperature in the model, in K). Right-click the model for Jump to Maximum in Cut Plane (with the clip plane on), Jump to Maximum on Surface of Body N (the outer surface of the body you clicked, e.g. the chip; results without body IDs use the whole shown surface), Add Marker Here, Remove Marker N and Clear Markers. Markers are updated when you change the field, result file or cycle; markers outside the new model are removed. Ported from EMStudio's field viewer.

3D Field Viewer: keys. With the 3D view focused: R / F / Home reset camera, I isometric, X / Y / Z axis views (Shift: negative side), + / − zoom, arrow keys pan, O parallel projection, M find max., A arrows on/off, P probe, PgUp / PgDn move the clip plane. VTK's own letter keys (e.g. w wireframe, 3 stereo, q / e which stopped the interactor) no longer do anything. The right-click menu now opens only on a click: a right-drag zooms without the menu popping up afterwards.

3D Field Viewer: the Cycle picker of a Palace field dump showed Palace's extra AMR error-indicator cycle as a frequency, e.g. "999 GHz (cycle 2)". It is now listed as "error indicator (cycle 2)". This happened when that cycle stores its Indicator/Rank values as point data. Dumps that store them as cell data were already listed as "geometry".

3D Field Viewer: running field_viewer.py / fieldViewer standalone with a window failed in Python environments that also have PyQt5 installed. Fixed.

Port de-embedding in scripts/combine_extend_snp.py fixed (the _deembedded.sNp and _dc_deembedded.sNp files): the negative inductance of all ports was put in series at port 1, and the other ports were not de-embedded. For a 3-port, port 1 got the sum of all three values. Now each port gets the value for its own port number; a port without geometry data in port_information.json is not de-embedded. The raw .sNp and the _dc.sNp files were not affected. Please run combine_snp again to create the de-embedded files again. The same bug was fixed in gds2palace, where Gianluca Simone and David Lurz (FAU) found it.

Full history: CHANGES.md

Note: the setupEM PyPI package itself requires:

• gds2palace>=0.9.0
• gds_prepare_for_EM>=1.3.0
• PySide6
• shiboken6
• scipy
• requests
• scikit-rf
• matplotlib
• numpy
• gdspy
• meshio
• pyvista
• pyvistaqt

(Other Python modules mentioned above are only needed to run standalone helper scripts in this repository, not to use the installed package.)