Hardware Accelerated Simulator for Scattering from Electrically Large Objects and Scenes

Over the past few decades, computational electromagnetics (CEM) researchers have been making steady progress towards the development of efficient algorithms, such as the Method of Moments (MoM), for simulating scattering from electrically large targets. Unfortunately, such techniques have proved too computationally demanding because they require the solution of an often very large and dense matrix. We therefore propose the use of reconfigurable hardware, specifically designed to solve the large, dense matrix equations. In Phase I, EM Photonics demonstrated the viability of using a reconfigurable hardware approach to accelerate the simulation of scattering from electrically large objects. Specifically, a successful hardware prototype was developed that demonstrated the tremendous speedups possible with our acceleration platform. In Phase II, this technology will be extended to create a commercial quality solver for such scattering problems capable of 40x improvements over currently available software implementations. Consequently, simulations that previously required one month of computation time can now be analyzed in less than a day! Given our Phase I success and the numerous academic, commercial, and government groups interested in this technology, we are confident that the Phase II effort will be a complete success, directly enabling the commercialization of this powerful tool.