Rapid-prototyping plays a critical role in the design of antennas and related planar circuits for wireless communications, especially as we embrace the 5G/6G protocols going forward into the future. While there are a number of software modules commercially available for such rapid prototyping, often they are found to be not as reliable as desired, especially when they are based on approximate equivalent circuit models for various circuit components comprising the antenna system. Consequently, it becomes necessary to resort to the use of more sophisticated simulation techniques, based on full-wave solvers that are numerically rigorous, albeit computer-intensive. Furthermore, optimizing the dimensions of antennas and circuits to enhance the performance of the system is frequently desired, and this often exacerbates the problem since the simulation must be run a large number of times to achieve the performance goal—an optimized design. Consequently, it is highly desirable to develop accurate yet efficient techniques, both in terms of memory requirements and runtimes, to expedite the design process as much as possible. This is especially true when the antenna utilizes metamaterials and metasurfaces for their performance enhancement, as is often the case in modern designs. The purpose of this paper is to present strategies that address the bottlenecks encountered in the generation of Green’s Functions for layered media, especially in the millimeter wave frequency range where the dimensions of the antennas and the platforms upon which they are mounted can be several wavelengths in size. The paper is divided into two parts. Part-I covers the topics of construction of layered medium Green’s Function for millimeter wavelengths; the Equivalent Medium Approach (EMA) which obviates the need to construct Green’s Function for certain geometries; and the T-matrix approach for hybridizing the finite methods with the Method of Moments(MoM). In Part-II of this paper, we go on to discuss three other strategies for performance enhancement of CEM techniques: the Characteristic Basis Function Method (CBFM); mesh truncation for finite methods by using a new form of the Perfectly Matched Layer (PML); and GPU acceleration of MoM as well as FDTD (Finite Difference Time Domain) algorithms. The common theme between the two parts is the “performance enhancement” of CEM (Computational Electromagnetics) techniques, which provides the synergistic link between the two parts.
Mittra et al. (Fri,) studied this question.