FDTD characterization of UWB antennas for home-entertainment equipment with special emphasis on the specific integration scenario

In this paper, a method for the efficient characterization of UWB antennas based on a combination of FDTD simulation and the Lorentz reciprocity principle is presented. In order to obtain a complete spatio-temporal characterization, the transmit transfer function (TF) of the antenna is first determined using an FDTD simulation of the nearfield scenario followed by a nearfield-to-farfield transformation. The application of the Lorentz reciprocity theorem then yields the receive TF. The TFs of the antenna allow the calculation of all quality measures of interest either in the frequency domain or the time domain (e.g. ringing or effective gain). Furthermore, as the TFs characterize completely the spatio-temporal behavior of the antenna they can be used as input data for propagation investigations in order to investigate the link between a transmitting and a receiving UWB system. The method is applied to a realistic example of a monocone antenna integrated in a canonical model of a DVD player. In addition, the link between the DVD player and a Vivaldi antenna is calculated for a simplified indoor scenario.