Performance of a custom and a commercial mesh generator in the simulation of a microstrip circuit

The MoM simulation time depends primarily on the number of unknowns (usually, it is the number of internal mesh edges). In this paper, the authors demonstrate the advantage of their custom mesh generator over the one built into the commercial software Ansoft Designer®. The two generators are used to simulate a conventional 2-GHz hybrid ring coupler described and measured in the literature (IEEE Trans. MT&T, 2004). The comparison of the simulation results (insertion loss, cumulated phase, isolation, and reflection) to the measurements shows that in order to achieve comparable accuracy, the proposed mesher generates up to 40% fewer unknowns than the built-in one. As a result, the simulation time is reduced even by 50%. In conclusion, the proposed mesh generator proves to be more efficient than the mesher of Designer® in the analysis of a hybrid ring coupler and - most likely - other similar microwave circuits.