Release Notes: Altair Feko 2021.2.1

Altair Feko 2021.2.1 is available with new features, corrections and improvements. This version (2021.2.1) is a patch release that should be applied to an existing 2021 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.

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.

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.

Feko 2021.2.1 Release Notes

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

CADFEKO

Resolved Issue

  • Improved the meshing of spiral structures to more accurately represent the geometry. In the past, in some cases, non-adjacent points in the spiral would be connected in the mesh.

POSTFEKO

Resolved Issues

  • Resolved an issue with the recently added support to view and process far field, near field and other results generated during S-parameter calculations (where the SP card option in EDITFEKO is enabled before calculation). For models with multiple configurations, some results could have been wrong or missing.
  • Resolved a problem that caused unpredictable Ctrl+Click selection of result palette entries.
  • Fixed a regression that got introduced in POSTFEKO 2019.2 where the iso-surface plot type was no longer available for spherical near fields.
  • Added unit information to indicate that the amplitude is plotted in dB when previewing spectrum of a time domain signal.
  • Resolved an issue where the message Warning 18219: The medium has been referenced (used), but it was never declared. Please correct the model by creating a suitable definition for the medium. was encountered due to media with identical properties being incorrectly merged. The media merging will now only occur when it is relevant.
  • Resolved the problem that the visibility of mesh segment lines could not be toggled through the API.

Solver

Features

  • Reduced the memory footprint of the linear equation solution phase of a simulation by exploiting shared memory architecture.
  • Added a warning regarding the validity of braided shield models with respect to frequency.
  • Added user warnings in cases where a cable's cross-section may violate MTL rules.
  • Added support for the PARAMS keyword in the .SUBCKT syntax of a SPICE netlist.
  • Reduce the number of low level MPI communications needed during far field calculation phases. This results in reduced far field calculation times and better scaling when the number of processes increase.

Resolved Issues

  • Detect stagnation during an iterative solution, where the process of reducing the residuum stops progressing and the iterative process should be exited instead of running to the maximum number of iterations.
  • Resolved an issue that resulted in the inability to visualise rays, from some faceted UTD models with creeping wave effects, in POSTFEKO.
  • An error message is now issued when simulating a model consisting of a material with zero permittivity.
  • For HOBF improve the segmentation error message given when a triangle is too large. A warning is added that higher order basis functions cannot be used at connection points or junctions (even if the user has specified HOBF on these triangles).
  • Correct results are now calculated when using Periodic Boundary Conditions for cases where the boundaries are electrically very close to each other.

WinProp 2021.2.1 Release Notes

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

ProMan

Features

  • Accelerated the transmission mode computation for 5G network planning projects.
  • Improved the display of courtyards in 2D and 3D view.

Resolved Issues

  • Resolved an error that occurred when using the post-processing option that includes transmitters and receivers, with individual location offset arrays used on both the base and mobile stations.
  • Resolved a high-memory-consumption problem that could occur in simulations with complicated geometries.
  • Added support for mobile station post-processing, using RunMS, in projects with satellite transmitters.
  • Made the settings dialog of the spatial channel impulse response accessible.
  • Preprocessed CNP projects, exported from ProMan, now include the indoor database.

WallMan

Features

  • Added support for triangulating selected objects. This can repair/replace objects that would otherwise be considered invalid, such as non-planar ones.
  • Preprocessing projects, including indoor/urban databases as well as any associated secondary data such as topography maps, can be exported from WallMan as a ZIP archive.
  • Added support to convert an indoor database (.idb) to an outdoor database (.odb).

Resolved Issues

  • Resolved an issue with IRT preprocessing when the walls are not perfectly planar.
  • Resolved an issue when converting a NASTRAN file to an indoor database format.
  • Resolved an error that could occur upon opening a pre-processing project with a relative file path.
  • Resolved an issue that led to horizontal plates being assigned negative heights after conversion from OpenStreetMap via a .odb urban database into a .idb indoor database.
  • Resolved a problem that occurred during preprocessing when vegetation blocks are partly outside the topography area.

AMan

Resolved Issue

  • An explanatory error message is issued when the transmission loss of a material in the MASC module exceeds 200 dB and produces unacceptable path loss.

Application Programming Interface

Feature

  • Added support for moving transmitters or receiving points along trajectories in rural and urban scenarios in the WinProp API.

Resolved Issues

  • Made the sorting of object IDs consistent between Windows and Linux.
  • Added support for simulations of projects using the ITU P.1546, ITU P. 526 or ITM propagation models with the WinPropCLI.
  • Updated the C# structures in the API.

newFASANT 2021.2.1 Release Notes

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

GUI

Resolved Issue

  • When the newFASANT graphical interface fails to resolve a newfasant.conf file at startup, a default configuration is generated and used. Previously this process wrote an error message to the output before continuing, which may have been misleading. A note with a clearer message is now written to the output.

Solver

Feature

  • By combining Ray-Tracing techniques with CBFM, an approach has been added where the optimal number of macro-basis functions is used for each block for the specific problem. This approach minimizes the number of unknowns while maintaining accuracy.

Resolved Issues

  • Fixed a bug that resulted in a simulation error during an array resizing operation in the PO module when multiple reflections and diffraction are considered.
  • Resolved several problems that caused unexpected asymmetry of reflected rays when using the US module.
  • Resolved various problems with the MIMO option when working with the GTD module.