[SI-LIST] Re: 3D tool: CST / HFSS

There are many things to consider and there is not a straight answer 
to a CST vs HFSS question. I have both packages and use them both 
regularly but I do use HFSS more (I have it longer). Some of the 
questions you have to answer (not all technical) in order to decide 
which one to purchase would be:

1) What are the typical applications you will use it for?
   - check out previous documentation/publications to see if the tool 
has been successfully used for this in past. Get examples from the 
application engineers during your evaluation trial.

2) What is the price difference and licencing options available, 
solver, front ends, post processing etc. Anything included such as 
discounts on other products (Q3D, Optimetrics, Design Studio, 
Designer etc..). It is a competitive market between these guys so get 
yourself the best deal.

3) I think this is an important one: what is the level of technical 
support you will get? On complicated tools like this it is important 
to have a very good level of technical support (online knowledge 
base, access to applications engineer etc), you need to get fast and 
correct! answers to your questions. 

My experience of technical support is: we have the basic support 
package from ansoft and because we are a educational insititute our 
questions are last to be answered. But with CST we have our own 
direct contact with an applications engineer who is very prompt with 
answers to any question and emails me monthly to see if we have any 
issues, which i think i very helpful.

In the end of the day both tools can be used to give the same results 
but with 3D solvers its all about the problem set-up. Get a one month 
evaluation from each of them and run similar projects and compare the 
results with measured data and check the difference in solver times, 
RAM used etc. 

Regards,
Eoin Mc Gibney,
Phd Student,
Centre for Adaptive Wireless Systems,
Cork Institute of Technology,
Cork,
Ireland.



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