Numerical methodologies for electromagnetic parasitic system modeling and simulation

Abstract

In this thesis, to efficiently and accurately model the electromagnetic radiations from electronic and antenna systems, and to analyze the hybrid electromagnetic (EM)-circuit system and the interactions between EM waves and multi-physics systems, a plethora of full-wave approaches are developed. Specifically, a set of frequency-domain methods are proposed in the first part of this thesis to characterize the electromagnetic radiations from device under test (DUT) based on the sampled near-field data. For the first approach, the dyadic Green function (DGF) in the presence of perfectly conducting sphere is expanded by spherical vector wave functions, which is mathematically rigorous. Based on this DGF and the reciprocity theorem, the radiation outside the spherical sampling surface can be accurately predicted with only the tangential components of the electric near-field over this sampling surface.

Sometimes for situations where electronic devices are placed in good conductive shielding enclosures with apertures or ventilation slots, only partially planar electric near-field sampling over the apertures or the slots is sufficient according to Schelkunoff’s principle. Due to the unavailability of analytical DGF and the prohibitively computational cost for the numerical DGF, a novel two-step process approach by considering the radiation problem as a scattering issue with incident waves from the equivalent magnetic currents derived from the sampled electric near-field is proposed.

However, the very near-field radiation inside the sampling surface cannot be retrieved with the above two approaches. To overcome this limitation, the equivalent source reconstruction based methods are introduced by replacing the radiators with equivalent current sources that are capable of reproducing the original radiation. Due to the difficulty of acquiring the phase information of the near-field data, a fully new iterative phaseless source reconstruction method (SRM) which only needs the amplitude of the electric field is developed. To reduce the computational cost of traditional SRM for broadband radiators, a wideband SRM based on a Stoer-Bulirsh (SB) recursive tabular algorithm is proposed. Enhanced by an adaptive frequency sampling strategy, only a very small number of frequency samples are required.

With the purpose to capture the nonlinear response of EM-circuit systems, transient scattering from penetrable objects, surface plasmon polarization (SPP) of grapheme below the terahertz range, and the impacts of random parameters on the physical behavior of stochastic systems, various novel discontinuous Galerkin time-domain (DGTD) based methods and their extensions are developed. For a practical electronic system, apart from the EM part, the presence of lumped elements must be considered. Therefore, a hybrid EM-circuit solver is indispensable. For the EM subsystem governed by Maxwell’s equations, it is solved by DGTD with an explicit time-marching scheme. For the lumped subsystem, circuit equations are constructed based on either the modified nodal analysis (MNA) derived from Kirchoff’s current law or the basic I-V relations. By introducing a port voltage and current, the EM and circuit solvers are synchronized in the temporal sequence at the lumped port. This synchronized EM-circuit solver is free of instabilities even though nonlinear circuit elements are involved.

For open-region scattering problem analysis, a novel approach by integrating the time-domain boundary integral (TDBI) algorithm with DGTD is developed. At the truncation boundary, the fields required for the incoming flux in DGTD is calculated using the TDBI from the equivalent currents over a Huygens’ surface enclosing the scatterer. The hybrid DGTD-BI ensures that the radiation condition is mathematically exact and the resulting computation domain is as small as possible since the truncation boundary conforms to scatterer’s shape.

By considering the one atom-thick graphene as an infinitesimally thin conductive sheet, a surface impedance boundary condition (SIBC) augmented DGTD algorithm is developed to model the graphene. With this SIBC, straightforward volumetric discretization is avoided, thus significantly reducing the memory cost and meanwhile alleviating the restriction on the minimum time marching size. Due to the complex relation between the surface conductivity σg (comprising contributions from both intraband and interband) and the angular frequency ω, direct mapping the numerical flux from the frequency to the time-domain via inverse Fourier transform is not available. To address this issue, a fast-relaxing vector-fitting (FRVF) technique is used to approximate the σg by rational functions in the Laplace-domain. Via inverse Laplace transform, the time-domain matrix equations are obtained in integral forms of time t. Resorting to finite integral technique (FIT), a fully-discrete matrix system can be achieved.

Finally, to consider the impact of random parameters on realistic electronic systems, a stochastic solver based on DGTD and sparse-grid collocation method is developed. To reduce the number of supporting, an adaptive strategy is utilized by using the local hierarchical surplus as error indicator. To improve the flexibility of the proposed algorithm, both piecewise linear and Lagrange polynomial basis functions are employed to handle different stochastic systems. Particularly, the piecewise linear basis function is more efficient for non-smoothly observables while Lagrange polynomials are more suitable for smoothly observables. With these strategies, the singularities and quick variations can be efficiently captured but with very small number of collocation points.

The above proposed algorithms are demonstrated by various examples, the accuracy, efficiency, and robustness of these algorithms are clearly observed.