Integrated Design and Simulation for Millimeter-Wave Antenna Systems
T. Cwik, D. S. Katz and F. J. Villegas
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
California Institute of Technology
4800 Oak Grove Drive
Pasadena, CA 91109-8099
Several instruments operating in the microwave and millimeter-wave
bands are to be developed over the next several years at either JPL or
JPL in conjunction with various other companies and laboratories. The
design and development of these instruments requires an environment
that can produce a microwave or millimeter-wave optics design, and can
assess the sensitivity of key design criteria (beamwidth, gain,
sidelobe levels, etc.) to thermal and mechanical operating
environments. An integrated design tool has been developed to carry out
the design and analysis using software building blocks from the
computer-aided design, thermal, structural and electromagnetic analysis
fields. The capability to simultaneously assess the effects of design
parameter variation resulting from thermal and structural loads can
reduce design and validation cost and generally lead to more optimal
designs, hence higher performing instruments.
In this paper the development and application of MODTool
(Millimeter-wave Optics Design), a design tool that efficiently
integrates existing millimeter-wave optics design software with a solid
body modeler and thermal/structural analysis packages, will be
discussed. The design tool is also directly useful over other portions
of the spectrum, though thermal or dynamical loads may have less
influence on antenna patterns at the longer wavelengths. Under a common
interface, interactions between the various components of a design can
be efficiently evaluated and optimized. One key component is the use
of physical optics analysis software for antenna pattern analysis.
This software has been ported to various platforms including
distributed memory parallel supercomputers to allow rapid turn-around
for electrically large designs.