The role of computer graphics cards in advancing electromagnetics education

Over the past decade video cards have grown from simple interfaces to the monitor to powerful computational engines. The rise in advanced graphics for games has driven the manufacturers of video cards to a more rapid development cycle producing computationally powerful chips. The current generation of advanced graphical processing units (GPU's) has over four times the number of transistors than the standard dual core CPU's. The vast majority of the transistors in these GPU's are dedicated to the calculations required by high end video games. Recent developments in programming languages has allowed the processing power of these chips be used for general mathematic processing. With the current development cycle of graphics processors outpacing their CPU counterparts at every twelve months, these chips only aim to get even more powerful in the future. One of the major problems encountered with teaching electromagnetics is simulating devices that are being taught. Often the analytical formulas will be discussed and simulations will be assigned as homework. Since the simulation time required even for smaller problems is prohibiting for demonstrations in class. Harnessing the power of the video cards for electromagnetic simulations allows the time required to analyze the devices being taught to be reduced from minutes down to seconds. Simple graphical user interfaces (GUI's) have been built to demonstrate the operation of simple electromagnetic devices such as patch antennas, microstrip filters, and printed dipoles with simulation times of under 30 seconds. This has been accomplished by interfacing a Matlab GUI with a GPU based FDTD simulator. With these GUI's the instructor or students can vary all the parameters of the devices and examine the effects in a matter of seconds. This allows the instructor to show what happens in a device when it is designed a certain way rather than just talk about the formulas in an abstract sense. The students can also use these programs to explore the operation of these devices.