Wireless communication is changing our world. The number and density of antennas in our immediate surroundings have exploded, and are increasing every day. There are literally hundreds of antennas in a typical home and thousands in an office building. Driven by the demands of the Internet of Things, along with autonomous vehicles and electrification initiatives in the aerospace sector, more antennas are required to be integrated into our devices to make all of this wireless interconnectivity possible.
This poses a huge challenge to technology companies on many levels — lack of experienced antenna design personnel, the requirements related to integration of multiple antennas on a single platform whose area is continually decreasing, interference, and supply chain collaboration are just a few. ANSYS’ High-Frequency Electromagnetics products suite, anchored by ANSYS HFSS, targets the challenges of wireless communication design with powerful, new collaborative antenna and wireless design workflow and analysis capabilities.
The Antenna Design Toolkit included in HFSS streamlines setup and analysis of antenna designs. This feature enables every engineer, even those new to antenna design, to create and optimize antenna designs and determine the best path to integration. Users simply select a desired antenna topology and operating frequency, then synthesize and solve. This simple design process leverages HFSS, the industry-standard 3-D full-wave electromagnetic field simulation solver along with its automatic adaptive meshing capabilities, to ensure accuracy.
To accomplish the vision of antennas everywhere, more collaborative partnerships will need to be developed to marry the necessary engineering expertise across a product’s supply chain. To help address this need with respect to simulation, an important new feature in HFSS is the “Encrypted 3-D Simulation Component with Hidden Content.” This is a new paradigm in the development of antenna and wireless systems, and savvy component suppliers and OEMs alike will quickly adopt this concept within their business practices to gain a competitive advantage.
Today’s designs are often developed hierarchically from legacy designs and/or new components in collaboration with multiple companies. HFSS provides the ability to create 3-D EM simulation components and integrate them into larger assemblies and systems. These 3-D components can include antennas, connectors, phased arrays and highly integrated chip-package-board systems; when utilized in HFSS, they create a complete and accurate description of the devices, which is fully simulated in the target 3-D environment. This capability is especially useful for sharing detailed device models within an organization and between supplier and system integrators.
Simulation-ready 3-D components can be created by an expert component designer and stored in library files, and can then be easily added to larger system designs without needing to apply excitations, boundary conditions and material properties. This leverages the existing information to save engineers valuable setup time and ensure accurate data entry. With the addition of encryption, you can hide design information, such as geometry, materials and other critical IP and share the component throughout the supply chain while continuing to fully capture the component’s behavior in the 3-D simulation without compromising accuracy. Sharing encrypted components allows system integrators to capture the complete EM interaction between a component, such as a supplier-provided antenna, and the platform. This patent-pending capability delivers 10x more reliability for system design, while accelerating and fostering a more collaborative design process.
The design concerns do not stop at the antenna. Placement and installed performance of the antenna design are also critical design issues. Placing an antenna on a large platform, such as an aircraft, automobile or ship, significantly influences the radiating characteristics of the antenna. With ANSYS 17.0, HFSS introduces integration with our new HFSS SBR+ (formerly Savant) shooting and bouncing ray (SBR) electromagnetic field solver. Antenna designs created in HFSS can be linked to HFSS SBR+, placed on an electrically large platform and rapidly solved. This combination solves many challenging design problems for the system integrator, such as optimal placement on a platform, calculating the antenna radiation pattern in isolation and when mounted on a platform, and predicting antenna coupling.
To complete the wireless design picture, the ANSYS RF Option now includes ANSYS EMIT, the industry-leading software for predicting RF co-site and EMI interference of multiple radio transmitters and receivers. EMIT allows a user to identify antenna co-site problems throughout the design cycle by building the system using multi-fidelity models for antenna-to-antenna coupling, RF systems, cables, filters and amplifiers. As the system design progresses and more information is available, EMIT’s multi-fidelity modeling approach allows you to apply more detailed and accurate radio or component models of higher fidelity from HFSS.
With ANSYS HFSS users have a full wireless system simulation solution that allows engineers to design IoT devices virtually. To learn about how ANSYS can help you design and optimize your IoT devices.
Learn about the latest advances in ANSYS HFSS for antenna design and placement in wireless systems. New features include antenna synthesis, design and processing; encrypted 3-D components with patent-pending hidden and encrypted design; and new high frequency solvers for antenna placement and radio frequency interference (RFI) diagnosis. Discover how ANSYS HFSS delivers the simulation features you need to create reliable, optimized systems, 10x faster than your competition.
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