Computational Electromagnetic Modeling Codes Available on the Internet
Ansoft Codes - Student Version
Ansoft offers student versions of three of their electromagnetic modeling codes that can be downloaded free of charge:
Ansoft Designer SV is a feature-limited version of Ansoft's commercially distributed Ansoft Designer. Ansoft Designer SV contains a complete high-frequency linear circuit simulator, schematic and layout design entry, powerful design utilities, and post-processing, all integrated in an easy-to-use environment.
Maxwell SV is a subset of Ansoft's commercially distributed Maxwell 2D. It is software for two-dimensional, electromagnetic, and electrostatic-field simulation.
SIMPLORER® SV is a version of Ansoft's commercially distributed SIMPLORER 6.0 that is limited in the size of problems that can be solved. SIMPLORER is a sophisticated multi technology simulation package for design in automotive, aerospace, power electronics, drives and related areas.
ASAP - Antenna Scatterers Analysis Program
A (Free!) General Purpose User-Oriented Computer Program for Analysis of Thin-Wire Structures in the Presence of Finite Ground. An alternative to the Numerical Electromagnetics Code (NEC) for analyzing insulated or bare thin wire antenna structures over a lossy or perfect ground plane based on the moment method. Available on the web at: http://raylcross.net//asap/index.htm
atlc - Arbitrary Transmission Line Calculator
atlc is a computer aided design (CAD) package for the design and analysis of electrical transmission lines and directional couplers of totally arbitrary cross section. By analysis, it is assumed one requires to find the electrical properties of a transmission line or coupler, where the physical dimensions of the device are known. This code uses a static 2D finite difference technique. It is available on the web at: http://atlc.sourceforge.net/
EMAP
EMAP is a family of three-dimensional electromagnetic modeling codes developed at the Missouri University of Science and Technology. Each code has different capabilities, but they all have a common easy to understand input file format. EMAP2 is a scalar FEM code, EMAP3 is a vector FEM code, and EMAP5 is a vector FEM/MoM code. They are available via the web at http://emclab.mst.edu/emap.html.
Fasthenry, Fastcap, and Fastlap
Fasthenry, Fastcap, and Fastlap are static moment method codes designed to calculate the resistance, capacitance, and inductance of 3D geometries. They were developed at the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics. A Windows port of Fasthenry and Fastcap can be found on a web page maintained by Enrico Di Lorenzo at http://www.fastfieldsolvers.com/..
(Geo-) Radar - FDTD
This is a fully 3D-FDTD simulation code. It uses Generalized Perfectly Matched Layers to damp outgoing waves. The configuration is highly configurable by a commented configuration file, but be sure to have 128MB+ memory available.
Authored by Carsten Aulbert
aulbert@aei-potsdam.mpg.de
Golm, Germany
Available on the web at: http://carsten.welcomes-you.com/radarfdtd
FEMM - Finite Element Method Magnetics
A set of programs running under win95/98/nt for the finite element solution of planar/axisymmetric problems in magnetostatics and low frequency magnetics. Includes a graphical preprocessor, a solver, and a graphical post processor. A free version is currently available. Authored by David Meeker, PH.D. Available on the web at: http://femm.foster-miller.net/
LC is simulation tool for the analysis of the electromagnetic properties of electrical interconnects that runs on CRAY, SGI or LINUX/x86 workstations. The full three-dimensional circuit is modeled, so all interactions are automatically included in the solution. The model can be excited by numerous types of waveforms, and the transient response measured using common values such as voltage and current. Circuit parameters such as inductance, capacitance, and impedance can be derived from the transient response, and frequency-domain results such as S-parameters can also be calculated. Far field radiation patterns can be obtained.
LC is primarily an electromagnetic simulation and uses the Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FD-TD) technique. FD-TD is a full wave explicit solution of Maxwell's equations in three dimensions. In FD-TD, the rectangular volume enclosing the model is discretized into a large number of small cells, which may be uniformly-sized, or may vary in size within the simulation space. The dielectric, permeable, lossy, and conducting material properties of each cell are incorporated into the field updates, which are performed interactively in small time steps.
An interface between the electromagnetic simulation and the circuit simulation program SPICE is available within LC. This allows the user to add arbitrary SPICE circuits, such as drivers and loads, into the interconnect model. The interconnect performance is calculated using the electromagnetic simulation, while the lumped-element circuits are evaluated by SPICE. Both simulations are performed in the time domain, and proceed in lock step.
Mie Scattering Code (MIEV)
A publically available code that computes many of the quantities involved in electromagnetic scattering from a homogeneous sphere. The code can be found at sunsite.unc.edu in /pub/academic/physics/Electro-mag/miev.tar.Z.
This is a suite of codes developed at the Mayo Clinic and offered as free software under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Technically, MMTL programs are in the class of 2-D and 2.5-D "field solvers", which convert dimensions and materials properties into electronic design parameters. The MMTL suite consists of several programs, including lossy, loss-free, quasi-static, and full-wave simulators. Circuit parameters are computed by either the method of moments (MOM) or finite element methods (FEM). Basic per-unit-length parameters are generated by the simulator, and can be converted into HSPICE W-element models. MMTL is implemented in C, C++, FORTRAN, sh, and Tcl/Tk, and has been deployed on HP-UX, Linux, Windows, Solaris, and Alpha/OSF1.
MEEP is a free finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) simulation software package developed at MIT to model electromagnetic systems. Meep supports 1d/2d/3d/cylindrical problems, distributed-memory parallelism, dispersive and nonlinear media, PML boundaries, and is completely scriptable via both C++ and Scheme (GNU Guile) interfaces.
MOMIC
MOMIC is a user-oriented method-of-moments PC program suitable for analyzing the electromagnetic behavior of arbitrarily shaped wire antennas and scatterers, modeled by piecewise linear segments, in free space. Capabilities of MOMIC include evaluations of the currents induced/excited on the wires, impedance/admittance parameters, near fields, and far-zone radiation and scattering patterns. With MOMIC one can analyze various antennas and scatterers composed of electrically thin straight and curved wires, and wire-grid models of conducting surfaces. The target platform for MOMIC executable is an 80486 (or Pentium) running under MS DOS in 32-bit protected mode.
MOMIC is available on the web at:
main site: http://victrix.iele.polsl.gliwice.pl/~akarw/momic/ in Poland
mirror site: http://emlib.jpl.nasa.gov/EMLIB/MOMIC/ in USA
The code is available from both these sites at no charge for non-commercial use.
MultiSTRIP is a moment-method program that analyzes microstrip antennas on multiple dielectric layers.
NEC2
NEC2 - the Numerical Electromagnetics Modeling code is a widely used 3D code based on the method of moments. It was developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory more than 10 years ago and has been compiled and run on many different computer systems. NEC2 is particularly effective for analyzing wire-grid models, but also has some surface patch modeling capability. NEC2 is available from Ray Anderson's "Unofficial NEC Archives" at http://www.qsl.net/wb6tpu/swindex.html
Online documentation can be obtained from the "Unofficial NEC Home Page" at http://www.nec2.org/
Penn State FDTD Code
This is a public domain FDTD code developed by R. Luebbers and K. Kunz that is described in their book The Finite Difference Time Domain Method for Electromagnetics CRC Press. It is available from ftp.emclab.mst.edu in the directory /pub/aces/psufdtd.
Students' QuickField(TM), formerly known as ELCUT, is a 2D finite element simulation package solving plane and axisymmetric problems of electrostatics, nonlinear DC magnetics, AC magnetics, current flow, nonlinear heat transfer, stress analysis and coupled problems on any PC.
A light version of Sonnet Software's planar-MOM electromagnetic simulation software.
Software developed to perform electromagnetic scattering simulations mainly based on classical Mie theory solution. ScatLab features: scattered intensity polar diagrams for coated and uncoated spherical particles; scattered intensity versus theta graphs for coated and uncoated spherical particles; scattered intensity versus radius graphs for homogeneous spherical particles; extinction, scattering and backscattering cross section graphs; angle depolarization graphs; near field imaging for homogeneous spherical particles; Lorentz and Drude dielectric function implementation for refractive index calculation; support for T-matrix method computations.
A light version of Sonnet Software's planar-MOM electromagnetic simulation software.
SUPERFISH
SUPERFISH is one of several codes available from the Los Alamos Accelator Code Group. SUPERFISH evaluates the eigenfrequencies and fields for arbitrarily shaped two-dimensional waveguides in Cartesian coordinates and three-dimensional axially symmetric RF cavities in cylindrical coordinates. The package contains codes to generate the mesh, to plot the fields and to evaluate auxiliary quantities of interest in the design of drift-tube linacs. For example, transit-time factors, power losses, and the effect of perturbations are calculated.
ToyPlane (2D), Toy (3D) and Pulse (full-functional 3D); TLM and FDTD codes
The ToyPlane and ToyAirport codes are 2D test and example codes for time-domain local-operator methods. The Toy and ToyBox codes are 3D test and example codes for time-domain local-operator methods. The Pulse codes are fully functional general 3D codes based on time-domain local-operator methods.
If you are aware of other numerical electromagnetic modeling codes available over the internet, please let us know about them so that we can reference them here. Send a one-paragraph description of the code and its location to emclab@mst.edu.
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