CFDTD solution for large waveguide slot arrays

The finite difference time domain (FDTD) technique consists of simulating time varying electromagnetic fields in various media with Maxwell's curl equations in the form of finite difference equations, which are then used in a leapfrog fashion to incrementally advance the discretized electromagnetic fields forward in time and solve for them at alternating intervals in space. The main drawback to the use of the FDTD method is the need for large computational resources, notably memory. The amount of memory required is a function of the grid employed to divide the problem space into individual cells. The memory requirements increase with the volume in the computational domain. The conformal FDTD (CFDTD) code is being developed jointly by RMA and the Navy for direct simulation of large complicated structures such as slotted waveguide array antennas. The ability to run on a parallel computing system and its highly versatile non-uniform meshing tool are two aspects of CFDTD that ease otherwise restrictive computational resource demands. CFDTD code performance including partitioning for parallel processing and computing runtimes are presented herein.