Electromagnetic Simulation of Microwave Components

Workers in industry and academia have been writing numerical codes to solve electromagnetic fields problems for several decades. These programs were often written - on main frame computers with little thought given to portability or the user interface. Only in the past few years have commercial general purpose electromagnetic field solvers become available to the engineering community. These commercial efforts are the result of advances in software and the development of low cost UNIX workstations. These commercial codes offer new opportunities for the microwave engineering community to validate existing analytical models, create new models and solve complex structures that cannot be reduced to an analytical model. This paper will briefly review the methods used in commercial electromagnetic field solvers and present some examples of their use in an engineering environment.