SEMINAIRE D'ANALYSE NUMERIQUE
Année universitaire 2008-2009
Mercredi 19 novembre 2008 :
Artem V. BORISKIN
(IETR & Institute of Radiophysics and Electronics, Kharkiv, Ukraine)
2-D analysis and synthesis of dielectric lens antennas
with boundary integral equations.
Integrated dielectric lens antennas (DLAs) are widely used in a variety of novel mm and sub-mm wave
systems including radars, various communication, imagine, and spectroscopy systems. The favorable features of such antennas are compact-size, low-cost, and high radiation efficiency. Development of such antennas with advanced characteristics is only possible via accurate preliminary synthesis that enables one to avoid costly prototyping. The key to success on this path is the efficiency of computer-aided design (CAD) tools used.
In spite of a traditional name "lens antennas", inherited from the times when such antennas were first proposed based on the optical ideology, the novel DLAs have stepped far away from being just a lens. For instance, the lens in a substrate-mounted DLA, in addition to focusing, provides suppression of surface waves, improves matching, and enables one to modify the operation frequency band of the primary feed(s). To describe accurately the electromagnetic performance of such DLAs, one needs an adequate simulation tool capable of accurate description of both the ray and modal effects in compact-size arbitrary-shaped dielectric scatterers.
An adequate CAD tool can be built based on the advanced theory of boundary integral equations (BIE). The important advantages of such algorithms are guaranteed and controllable accuracy achieved with low consumption of computer resources. This makes them to be a preferable choice in comparison with those based on combinations of geometrical and physical optics or FDTD that are often used for DLA analysis until now.
In this seminar, the basic operation and design principles of DLAs will be outlined, as well as different methods of analysis with their advantages and bottlenecks discussed. The numerical results to be included in the presentation will illustrate the true electromagnetic performance of reduced-size dielectric lenses and will highlight the "physics behind the scene" which is important for designing DLAs with improved radiation characteristics.