Comprehensive Array Design System for Printed Circuit Antennas

摘要

Printed Circuit antennas offer the potential for high gain, efficient, compact,lightweight, conformal antenna array systems. We have prototyped a Design Automation system consisting of design, simulation and synthesis tools targeted at Printed Circuit array antenna development. This system is integrated with existing, graphical layout editor L-Edit(TM) and electromagnetic (EM) simulation tools, and have developed three application specific Green's functions. We have supported industry standard geometry files for capturing existing designs, and we have demonstrated graphics and tabular display modules tr display input impedance, S-Y-Z parameters, radiation patterns, gain and efficiency. To demonstrate design entry, we have developed a small set of library elements for commonly used feed elements, including parameterized elements to support tuning, sensitivity analysis, synthesis and self adaptation algorithms. The user interface is layered, with options and technology specific parameters and simulation options set to reasonable, default values for use by the novice designer, but configurable for customization by the expert designer. We have studied and specified the requirements for antenna/array synthesis and enhanced EM simulation capabilities, including full wave, multilayer substrate, application specific Green's functions. We have identified a full wave approach, currently under development that is particularly well suited to PC antenna array validation.