Release Notes: Altair Feko 2022.3.2

Altair Feko 2022.3.2 is available with new features, corrections and improvements. This version (2022.3.2) is a patch release that should be applied to an existing 2022 or 2022.3 installation.

Feko is a powerful and comprehensive 3D simulation package intended for the analysis of a wide range of electromagnetic radiation and scattering problems. Applications include antenna design, antenna placement, microstrip antennas and circuits, dielectric media, scattering analysis, electromagnetic compatibility studies including cable harness modelling and many more.

newFASANT complements Altair’s high frequency electromagnetic software tool (Altair Feko) for general 3D EM field calculations, including, among others, special design tools tailored for specific applications like complex radomes including FSS, automated design of reflectarrays and ultra-conformed reflector antennas, analysis of Doppler effects, ultrasound systems including automotive or complex RCS, and antenna placement problems. Advanced solver technologies like the MoM combined with the characteristic basis functions (CBFS), PO/GO/PTD, GTD/PO and MLFMM parallelised through MPI/OpenMP, being some of them especially efficient for the analysis of electrically very large problems.

WinProp is the most complete suite of tools in the domain of wireless propagation and radio network planning. With applications ranging from satellite to terrestrial, from rural via urban to indoor radio links, WinProp’s innovative wave propagation models combine accuracy with short computation times.

WRAP is a comprehensive tool for electromagnetic propagation, antenna collocation and spectrum management. WRAP combines propagation analysis, often over large areas with many transmitters and receivers, with system analysis to include complex non-linear equipment properties.

Feko 2022.3.2 Release Notes

The most notable extensions and improvements to Feko are listed by component.

CADFEKO

Resolved Issues

  • Improved the performance of moving components on the cable schematic view for large models.
  • Resolved an error when loading a legacy CADFEKO model if the region medium of a child geometry was set to Plane/ground (finite) (enclosing an infinite multilayer substrate inside a region) and Plane/ground was set to No ground. In CADFEKO, a yellow icon will indicate if the model is incorrect, and a suggested course of action will be given in the tooltip when hovering over the icon.
  • Fixed a non-deterministic issue which could have resulted in a mesh shifting when loading a saved model. For models that have been saved in the broken state, it is required to remesh the model.
  • Fixed a bug where saving the model would sometimes stop working after a number of save actions in the CADFEKO GUI or using a Lua script. The bug was related to the undo stack depth setting, and saving would not work correctly after performing more steps than the undo stack depth.
  • Legacy CADFEKO allowed the user to specify an invalid (Cable reference direction on the Create Cable Path dialog (Advanced tab). The latest CADFEKO cannot convert the file but will inform the user about the errors. These errors can be corrected in legacy CADFEKO.
  • Fixed an error which resulted in the Spiral - planar, Spiral - cavity backed and Vivaldi - coplanar antennas in the component library not created successfully.
  • Resolved an issue where the mesh model port and its associated named points were not written to the .pre file.
  • Corrected a problem where faces were incorrectly written to the .cfm file if the face had a coating set, even when the coating setting was ignored (disabled).
  • Improved the selection of model mesh entities in the 3D view.
  • The edge port orientations written to the .pre file have been corrected so that they are consistent for sources, non-radiating networks and transmission lines.
  • Allow legacy models which result in an invalid model hierarchy to be still loaded into CADFEKO. Added a warning message indicating the failed validation to allow a user to correct the model.
  • Improved the endpoint selection of a wire when there are entities behind the wire and the snap settings are set to snap to the mesh.
  • Improved the performance of saving .cfx files for models with a large number of mesh elements.
  • When loading a legacy CADFEKO .cfx file and a part fails to mesh, an error message will be displayed in the model status panel to indicate the face that prevented the part from meshing.
  • Resolved an assertion failure with the message “UpdatingStateException” that occurred when a legacy .cfx file containing transforms applied to unioned geometry failed to convert to the new CADFEKO format.
  • Resolved a crash that could have occurred during the conversion of a legacy .cfx model if a delete modifier tried to delete a face twice.
  • Resolved an issue for the spin operator when the origin is non-zero.
  • Corrected the .pre file writing for non-conducting elements.
  • When calling RunPREFEKO, RunFEKO or RunOPTFEKO methods from the Launcher API, the output field will no longer contain the “linefeed”, “notice”, “warning” or “error” tags which are inserted when calling these Feko components with the run-from-gui command line argument.
  • Corrected the model mesh to be transparent when the simulation mesh is displayed with overlay.
  • Corrected FEM line mesh ports that reference vertices to take transformations on the mesh into account.
  • Corrected the spin operation to show an arrow for the rotation angle preview.

POSTFEKO

Resolved Issues

  • Resolved assertion failures that could have occurred when using the POSTFEKO Calculate Mixed Mode S-Parameters application macro.
  • When importing data from a DRE file which contains only realized gain information and the power information required to correctly convert to accurate gain and field values is unavailable, a lossless system is now assumed and field and gain values calculated. In most cases these values will not represent the real gain and field values as there will be losses that should be accounted for.
  • Resolved an error when importing DRE data on Linux systems.

Solver

Resolved Issues

  • Improved the error checking mechanism when a triangular patch and a tetrahedral element overlap.
  • Enforced FEM error checks for anisotropic media at a FEM outer boundary. An error message is issued if an anisotropic FEM region is not bound by FEM tetrahedra.

Support Components

Features

  • Resolved an error when importing a .rei file with only signal layers in the stack up for the Pre-Process PollEx Rei File application macro.
  • Added a new file format when importing custom data from a .csv file for a base antenna element with multiple ports for the Generate antenna array application macro. This is useful for differential antenna excitations and other configurations with more than one port.

Resolved Issues

  • Extended the Calculate embedded element patterns option in the Generate antenna array application macro to include all port types.

WinProp 2022.3.2 Release Notes

The most notable extensions and improvements to WinProp are listed by component.

General

Resolved Issues

  • Resolved an issue with TuMan tunnel geometry export to .idb file, which resulted in an error and incorrect exported geometry.
  • A warning will now be issued, “Falling terrain is too steep, PE might be invalid”, in the case of too steep decreasing terrain in conjunction with the Parabolic Equation (PE) model.

ProMan

Resolved Issues

  • The Use exact coordinates instead of vertical plane approximation option is now also considered for the Parabolic Equation wave propagation model.
  • Resolved a crash that occurred after starting an auto-calibration of a Dominant Path Model.
  • Resolved an issue where the ground reflection was not computed over the total distance between the transmitter and the receiver when using the 3D Intelligent Ray Tracing (IRT) model.

WallMan

Resolved Issues

  • Improved the robustness of OpenDRIVE database conversion by effectively handling numerical precision issues.

Application Programming Interface

Features

  • Extended the FMCW API example to generate Range-Angle Heatmaps.

WRAP 2022.3.2 Release Notes

The most notable extensions and improvements to WRAP are listed by component.

General

Resolved Issues

  • Error in ObsMan method 1 calculations has been corrected. The error could cause obstacles to be set to OK to build when using the worst case method, if the case had not been previously saved, closed and loaded again in ObsMan. Now it works correctly also for a newly created unsaved case.