A memory-hierarchy-based optimization of MECA (Modified Equivalent Current Approximation) for the analysis of electrically large dielectric and lossy structures

Asymptotic high frequency computational techniques are widely used in modeling scenarios with electrically large scatterers. A well-known technique of this type, physical optics (PO), has been extensively tested in several contexts. Meana et al. (2009) present a new PO analysis of dielectric and lossy geometries. In this method, called modified equivalent current approximation (MECA), the interface is discretized into planar triangular facets. Then, the Snell reflection coefficients establish the relation between incident and reflected waves. This modified PO method successfully models problems which may be prohibitive for full-wave simulation. In this work, the authors developed an OpenMP parallel version of MECA in order to reduce even more the execution time. In this parallel code, the memory-hierarchy-based optimization techniques was implemented. As seen in the results of this paper, these techniques can improve the computational performance when calculating the scattered fields.