Institute of Technology of Cambodia

Antenna Design
(Using HOBBIES: Higher Order Basis Based Integral Equation Solver)

I.

Objective

In wireless communication, Antenna is the mostly device thats used

to transmit or receive the signal at radio frequency. In addition, Antenna
may be defined as a transducer between a guided wave propagating in a
transmission line and an electromagnetic wave propagating in an
unbounded medium (usually free space), or vice versa. Antennas
parameter (i.e. Antennas height, radiated power, wave length) have been
designed and determined to satisfy the application that have been used.
Before building a real antenna (i.e. hardware), there are 3 steps that are
needed to complete:
-

II.

Theoretical understanding
Numerical method
Simulation

Theoretical understanding

After Jame Clerk Maxwell fixed Ampres law, he combined the four
equations of electromagnetic which now are called Maxwell equation. This
equation provides the correlation between electric field and magnetic field
which is stated that: A changing magnetic field produces electric field
and a changing electric field produce magnetic field. This phenomenon
creates (in classical electromagnetism) a wave, called electromagnetic
wave, which propagates in free space at the speed of light. So, in order to
produce electromagnetic wave, it is necessary to create a time-varying
field. Moreover, this time-varying field can be done by accelerating a
charge, oscillating an electric dipole or magnetic dipole, etc., which is
called the source. In practice, the source is not placed near the antenna,
so it is necessary to connect it by a transmission line which is showed in
Figure1.

III.

Numerical method

In practice, as the increasing of research and development in a wide

variety of application, a single device may consist of many materials
which is included conductor, dielectric, and semiconductors of arbitrary
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shapes and of a complex physical nature. In this case, Maxwell equation
cannot determine and analyze its characteristic in closed form. This has
led to intensive research on numerical method of electromagnetic field
problems which is known as computational electromagnetic (CEM). It is a

Figure1. Antenna as a transition device.

branch of electromagnetics that deals with computational methods and is

a natural extension of the analytical approach to solving the Maxwell
equation.
There are many numerical techniques among CEM that can be used
to discretize an integral equation or differential equation into a matrix
equation that can be executed by softwares package library. Such as:

Method of Moment (MoM)

Finite Element Method (FEM)
Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) and so on.

After discretizing the integral equation or differential equation into

matrix form, there are needed an algorithm to store the value and solve
the unknown of the matrix equation that include:

LU factorization
RWG (Rao-Wilton-Glisson) basis function
Higher-order basis function and so on.

Choosing the right technique for solving a problem is important, as

choosing the wrong one can either result in incorrect results, or results
which take excessively long to compute.

IV.

Simulation

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As mentioned above, it is necessary to choose the right CEM
technique and solvers in order to get the good result. On the other hand,
the type of programming of the processor and the method of storing data
of memory is strongly effect the result of the computation.
As the new generation of the computer processor, which are
multicore instead of single-core, parallel programing has been used
instead of serial programing because of it high capacity of computing.
Moreover, CEM technique needs to deal with huge dense matrix for very
complex problems. This lead to a requirement of a large amount of RAM
and thus most of computers on hand may not easily satisfy this criterion.
Therefore, to break the limitation of RAM, out-of-core solvers are
introduced instead of in-core solvers. Furthermore, parallelized out-of-core
solutions provided tool to generate numerically accurate results within a
reasonable time frame by using high-performance computers.
As what is introduced above, these can lead to choose the right
software in the field of computation. In other word, this project has been
implemented by HOBBIES software. HOBBIES (Higher Order Basis Based
Integral Equation Solvers) provides computational methodologies to
overcome the limitations inherent in MoM by using a unique advanced
out-of-core parallel solver. Moreover, it is important to note that since the
software is integrated with the hardware the penalty of using an out-ofcore solver over an in-core one with large RAM to be approximately ONLY
20% slower than the latter. Thus providing numerically accurate results
within a reasonable time frame makes HOBBIES unique in the area of EM
solvers. HOBBIESs interface that is needed to register is show in Figure2.

Figure2. HOBBIESs interface

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V.

Conclusion

In conclusion, there are many materials that are needed to

understand before starting to design an antenna. It is necessary to choose
understand the phenomena of the radiation of the electromagnetic wave.
Moreover, the befitting computational electromagnetic technique, solver,
and software are needed to choose carefully in order to get the reliable
result in a reasonable period. On the other hand, because of the needed of
the registering of the software, this project has been delayed until the
license number arrived.

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Institute of Technology of Cambodia

REFERENCES
1. YU ZHANG, and TAPAN K. SARKAR, Parallel Solution of Integral
Equation-Based EM Problems in the Frequency Domain, Wiley-IEEE
press, June 2009.
2. DAVID J. GRIFFITHS, Introduction to Electrodynamics, fourth edition,
Pearson Education, 2013.

3.

Constantine A. Balanis, Antenna theory analysis and design,

third edition, Wiley Interscience, 2005.

4.

Em-hobbies.com

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