Unified computer-aided simulation of impedance, mutual coupling, radiation and scattering characteristics of single or multilayered printed antennas and arrays

Printed antennas have become popular as cheap, light-weight and conformal antennas in modern radar, satellite, mobile and personal communication systems. However, the conventional geometries of microstrip patches printed on a single-layered substrate, and fed by a coaxial probe or a microstrip line, do not meet the diverse requirements in advanced designs. Printed antenna geometries with novel arrangements of patches, dipoles or slots, configured in single or multiple layers, and fed from transmission lines by proximity or aperture coupling are in increasing demand in order to meet complex requirements of bandwidth, polarization, gain, coverage, or beam-scanability. Computer-aided tools will be inevitable in such new designs. With the objective of providing a general-purpose design support for a large number of possible configurations, the authors are developing a unified computer-aided simulation tool, UNIFY. This simulation tool, the only one of its kind, will allow computation of input impedance, mutual coupling, radiation as well as the scattering characteristics of arbitrary geometries of single or multilayered printed antennas and arrays. The authors discuss the unified method of implementation, and present representative simulation results to demonstrate the versatility and accuracy of UNIFY.