i am dealing with a simulation of a power divider in a multilayer mmic technology. the real realization of the device use a large are of metal embedded in a thin substrate layer. i model that by the via. so the model in the EDA has large area of via. So the simulation time is too long to wait.

I have tried the several 2.5D simulator. IE3D, Sonnet, and AWR. only the AXIEM in awr working some faster. about 1 hour to finished the simulation on a dual core 2.5G cpu.

Now i turn to try the 3D simulator. I want to ask the experienced person. what simulator and method is best to use for effectively simulate the large area of via model. i mean short simulation time without loss the accuracy.

thanks in advance.

If you are looking for something faster than those, I wouldn't switch to a 3D simulator. This will only slow you down. I would suggest to give Agilent ADS a try as a 2.5D simulator. Quite accurate and reasonably fast. ADS is a kind of a golden standard in this respect.
If you really want to go for a 3D, then it depends whether you need simulation at a couple of frequency points or you want broadband simulations.