Tools for electromagnetic modeling and visualization using the FDTD technique

Because of the invisible nature of electromagnetic waves, the tasks of analyzing, modeling, and designing of antennas and microwave devices are less manageable than the design of other types of electronic circuits or devices. Efforts have been focused on building tools for visualizing electromagnetic waves emerging from canonical and simple structures. With lesser success, there are a few modeling tools available for a true analysis of practical EM designs. However, the majority of such available tools are basically commercial in nature and are cost prohibitive to the researchers in the academic environment. This paper provides an overview of several graphical user interfaces (GUIs) developed for electromagnetic computational tools for the finite difference time domain (FDTD) technique. These user interfaces overcome the major difficulties that slow down the EM analysis process. The main tasks of these GUIs are to simplify the process of describing a composite structure to the computational engine, to provide real-time visualization of the generated fields and other related parameters, and to allow for post processing of the computed field values. Tools for 1D, 2D FDTD, and 3D FDTD interface, are presented.