A comparison of finite difference time-domain (FDTD) and transmission-line modeling (TLM) methods

This paper presents both theoretical and qualitative comparison of the two most popular time-domain numerical methods for the analysis of electromagnetic problems: the transmission-line modeling (TLM) method and the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD). The comparison is based on the author's experience as well as others. While TLM is a physical model based on Huygens' principle using interconnected transmission lines, the FDTD is an approximate mathematical model directly based on Maxwell's equations.