Advances in electromagnetics-based design optimization

After decades of research and development in the computation of electromagnetic (EM) fields, the microwave breakthrough in harnessing commercial field solvers for design optimization appeared in the early 1990s. Almost simultaneously, the commercial implementation of an effective response surface technique was complemented by the discovery of the space mapping concept that promised electromagnetically validated, near optimal solutions at the expense of only a few high-fidelity full-wave simulations. Simplified models, even coarse electromagnetic models, could now be iteratively “mapped” on-the-fly to full-wave models through the 1995 aggressive space mapping algorithm. In this paper, we offer a brief overview of further advances to date, including space mapping, response correction techniques, simulation-based tuning, as well as feature-based modeling and optimization.