Simulation software for new antenna

A British company, Vector Fields, part of Cobham plc, has released practical design tools to help RF designers exploit the properties of metamaterials, as part of its work for the AMULET research project.

Metamaterials can provide a means to enhance the performance and size of wireless components — for example, by making antennas multifunctional and reducing the size and cost of front-end filtering.

AMULET (advanced materials for ubiquitous leading-edge electromagnetic technologies) is researching artificial materials and their application in the design and manufacture of next-generation broadband, multifunctional, adaptive and conformal antennas for aerospace systems.

It is a three-year collaborative R&D project that has received investment from Britain's Technology Strategy Board.

Led by Cobham's ERA Technology, the other consortium partners are the National Physical Laboratory, Queen Mary University of London and Vector Fields.

Vector Fields' role is providing antenna developers with enhanced design tools to simulate metamaterial structures. The first phase of this support is currently being released to the market in the new version of the high-frequency electromagnetic design tool, Concerto.

One of the key problems addressed by this software is efficient and fast simulation, which is handled by exploiting the periodic nature of passive metamaterial structures to minimise the computations required.

The project will also be exploring the use of active metamaterials, and Vector Fields intends to add modelling support for these in future developments.

Antennas are a major application for metamaterials. A typical example might be to use metamaterials to tailor the effective impedance of a substrate or ground plane, to improve an antenna's radiation pattern and efficiency.

Metamaterial structures could additionally be used to integrate common filtering requirements such as bandpass filters into the two-dimensional PCB structure, to reduce the cost and size of a wireless product's electronic bill of materials.

Phase shifting is another function that is easily achieved by metamaterials, providing further design possibilities for wireless equipment.

If the metamaterial structure is made active, then even more gains could be made, such as creating an antenna and filtering front end that could operate across multiple frequency bands.