Array and multiport antenna farfield simulation using EMPIRE, MATLAB and ADS

Abstract

This paper presents an efficient farfield simulation, exploiting and linking the strength of three commercial simulation tools. For many practical array and multiport antenna designs it is essential to examine the farfield for a general port excitation or termination scenario. Some examples are phased array designs, problems related to mutual coupling and scan blindness, tuning of parasitic elements, MIMO antennas and correlation. The proposed method fully characterizes the nearfield and the farfield of the antenna, so to compute farfield patterns by means of superposition for any voltage/current state at the port terminals. A recently published low-cost patch antenna phased array with analog beam steering by another group was found very suitable to demonstrate the proposed method.