Numerical Simulation of the FDTD Method in LabVIEW [Application Notes]

LabVIEW (Laboratory Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench) is a National Instruments program development. In this article, we present an FDTD code developed in Lab VIEW for basic scattering modeling. 1-D formulation with simple radiating boundary condition followed by a 2-D formulation is presented. The implementation of the PML boundary condition has been used to truncate the 2-D model used for the simulation to avoid reflections from the edges of the modeling grid. This particular formulation allows one to terminate any given material directly in the PML layers without virtually any reflection between the region of interest and the PML absorbing boundaries. The formulation uses the electric field E, the magnetic field H, and the electric displacement D rather than only the electric and magnetic fields as in usual FDTD implementation. This formulation has the advantage of making the PML properties completely independent of the background medium.