Experience of antenna simulation using NEC, FDTD and a novel moment method

Electromagnetic field computation strategies can be broadly divided into two camps: integral-equation methods and differential-equation methods. The integral equation methods such as the method of moments are efficient and accurate for small problems that do not involve a dielectric, but the run times of the programs can increase extremely rapidly for more detailed models requiring more data points. The need for exchange of information between every node in the system and every other node also limits the suitability for such programs to be transferred to parallel supercomputers, since the communications overhead becomes very high. Conversely, the demand for communications between nodes is very small with finite-difference methods and hence they are very well suited for implementation on parallel computers. The new moment method program was used to model helical self-resonant antennas, such as those used on mobile telephone handsets.