Agilent's Antenna Modeling Design System (AMDS)

Agilent’s Antenna Modeling Design System (AMDS) allows for efficient modeling, optimization and verification of complex antennas and helps reduce design cycle risks. This far field plot of a 25x25 patch array antenna was generated using AMDS 2007.05 [Image courtesy: Agilent Technologies © 2008]

Modeling, simulating and optimizing complex antenna systems is an intricate process that includes setting up layout and simulation parameters and mathematical post-processing of the simulation results. Due to the time-consuming nature of placing and analyzing many elements in a system, designers frequently simplify simulations and use external tools to perform the necessary computations. This process is cumbersome and introduces design risk.

To address these problems, Agilent Technologies Inc. today announced the availability of its latest Antenna Modeling Design System (AMDS) release. The full-wave 3-D electromagnetic (EM) modeling and simulation software contains a scripting feature for performance optimization and automation of complex designs such as patch array antennas, allowing designers to fine tune antennas for the best performance within electronic devices, such as handheld wireless cell phones.

AMDS is a full-wave, 3-D EM design, modeling and verification tool dedicated to antenna and antenna systems design. It meshes, simulates and optimizes an entire wireless device, together with its surrounding real-world environment, to analyze compliance standards such as HAC, SAR (Specific Absorption Rate), and antenna diversity and MIMO (Multiple-Input, Multiple Output). Simulating devices with AMDS can reduce design cycle time by up to 75% compared with that required by other types of EM simulators available today, the company claimed.

The new 'Python'*-based scripting capability in this 5th release of AMDS allows designers to write their own programs to automate element placement and incorporate mathematical functions to perform virtually any analysis on the antenna design before it is integrated into the complete mobile wireless device. Designers also can use equations to define the geometry of complex antennas (such as those with fractal and conformal surfaces) to optimize performance. With changes to the script, designs can be quickly and efficiently optimized and verified long before the entire phone is available for either simulation or physical testing.

For more details, visit Agilent's AMDS webpage.

*Python is a popular open-source object-oriented programming language that supports integration with other languages and tools, and comes with extensive libraries.