A Computer Aided Design Tool for Active Radio Frequency Antenna Arrays

The objective of this Small Business Innovation Research project is to develop a visual CAD software tool for the design of large-scale active radio frequency antenna arrays. A circuit-based global modeling strategy is proposed that can integrate theanalyses of spatially distributed electromagnetic structures, linear passive networks and nonlinear active circuits within a unified framework that can even incorporate thermal analysis in a self-consistent manner. The proposed strategy can be utilized inboth frequency and time domains. The Phase I study so far has demonstrated the feasibility of interfacing full-wave frequency domain electromagnetic simulators with a general-purpose linear/nonlinear circuit simulator that uses a harmonic balancetechnique. In the proposed Phase II, the full-wave simulation engines will be fully integrated with the nonlinear circuit simulator within a unified design environment. A time domain capability will also be added to address certain classes of nonlinearstructures and their transient analysis. The developed software will be validated extensively using a number of test structures including active antenna arrays and nonlinear microwave circuits. The object-oriented architecture of emPiCASSO, our commercialantenna CAD tool, will be used as the foundation of the proposed software.