Development Electronic Design Automation for RF/Microwave Antenna Using MATLAB GUI

Introduction

Nowadays, radio (RF) and microwave devices have been widely used and have become indispensable necessities in our daily work, such as 5G communication networks, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, mobile phones, the Internet, and RFID-based security system in work offices. The rapid development of communication technology is mainly attributed to the existing electronic design automation (EDA). Electronic design automation can design and modify communication components and devices in a short period of time, such as making 5G improvements to 4G technologies. The manufacturer's production process time and cost (no need to build trial prototypes) can be significantly reduced and obtain product prices that the general public can afford.

Now, the competition for EDA microwave business is accelerating, EDA manufacturers are trying to promote their products to the university to populate the use of EDA among university students. This is because future graduates’ students will indirectly determine the brand and type of EDA used in the manufacturer in which they work. At the same time, the university is also trying to study the most popular types of EDA used by manufacturers before purchasing the EDA software for student learning and research. Many types of microwave EDA have been sold on the market, some specially for solving planar shape (printed circuit board) problems, and some provide a wide range of solutions for all situations as listed in Table 1. Due to the increase in PC technology, the complexity and functions of EDA have also increased from 2D virtual view to 3D virtual view, and now has animation simulation capabilities. In addition, the dimensions of the microwave device to be designed can be automatically optimized and adjusted through the latest version of EDA.

Nowadays, emerging 4G/5G communication circuit tends to assembled with nanoscale monolithic-microwave-integrated circuits (MMICs), hence designers can no longer design their circuit parts independently, since designers need to consider specifications and performance of the MMICs on the circuit. Therefore, most EDAs have built-in MMIC packages/modules, allowing designers to simulate microwave circuits containing certain brands and models of MMICs. However, if the designer only focuses on the antenna part, the designer can still design the antenna independently and ignore the circuit assembly effect.

In this chapter, the development of simple EDA (so-called antenna calculator) using MATLAB GUI for several antennas has been presented, such as monopole antenna, Yagi-Uda array antenna, log-periodic antenna, rectangular waveguide antenna, helical antenna, pyramidal horn antenna, and conical monopole antenna. Although, there are free antenna calculators that microwave manufacturers provide online or download, but those calculators are usually simple and only shows one or two calculated outputs. In fact, the latest version of MATLAB software has been attached with “antenna designer” app. The complexity and accuracy for the “antenna designer” app is quite high since the numerical-based solutions have been used in the app.

There may be a question to be asked why it is necessary to review analytical formulas since now advanced numerical-based EDAs are available? Indeed, the main factor is the cost of the simulators and computer workstations. In addition, the analytical analysis is particularly useful when designer would like to use for initial design an antenna that operates at very low frequencies (f < 100 MHz) or at very high frequencies (f > 20 GHz). Some low-frequency antenna has a size up to few meters. On the other hand, the size for high-frequency antenna may only a few millimeters. Those situations will provide difficulties in numerical-based simulation (require very high density and large amount of mesh in simulation as well as time consuming) using a regular personal computer (PC) or high-medium end PC.

Since analytical solutions are implemented in this study EDA, hence the program running time is significantly reduced (less than 1 second using a PC with an i5 processor and 4 GB RAM). Besides, the EDA’s GUI is created in a simple and compact form, which is less input parameters and at the same time provides high accuracy of simulation results. The calculated results from this MATLAB-based EDA are compared with the results obtained from commercial EDA for accuracy verification. The analytical formulas used in the study EDA will be described in detail. In this chapter, open-source and commercial microwave EDA are comprehensively reviewed.