SEMCAD X Workshop & Users Meeting @ EUCAP 2011

Get a Grip on the Problem:
Interactive Design and Advanced Antenna Applications using SEMCAD X

Workshop and Users Meeting

Date & Time: Thursday, 14th of April 2011, 14.00 - 16.30
Venue: EurCongressi, Room G2
Cost: the workshop is provided at no cost
Catering: coffee/drinks and sweets/sandwiches will be provided for free
Material: material and CDs will be handed out during the workshop

Limited seating is available, registration is required and will be handled on a first come first serve basis.

If you are interested in participating please send an email to semx-workshop@speag.swiss.

Please note that SPEAG is offering a free (fully functional and time-unlimited) version of SEMCAD X Light to all EuCAP participants (available in delegate bag).

(click on image to get full flyer)

This year's SEMCAD X EuCAP workshop presents itself in an exciting format, encompassing - in addition to our SPEAG experts - several internationally renowned guest speakers and research groups, presenting their simulation results and experience.

The talks and interactive presentations form a nice melange of research and applications from within fields of antennas, arrays, BioEM interaction/effects, compliance, medical assessment/treatment and High Performance Computing.

In addition, our SPEAG SEMCAD X team would like to give a short overview of our current development activities, forthcoming releases and then be mainly available for questions and discussions. Also to assist in providing insights and tricks (hands-on) regarding the operation and use of our simulation tool and related applications. Moreover, to exchange experience, learn about the latest features and requirements and finally seed some sparks, excitement and ideas for forthcoming work.

Please find an overview of the highlighted workshop presentations as follows (in order of appearance).

SEMCAD X EuCAP 2011 Workshop Presentation Series

Latest SEMCAD X Features and Advances in CEM: State-of-the-Art and Outlook

Nicolas Chavannes, Stefan Schild and SEMCAD X Team
Schmid & Partner Engineering AG, Zurich, Switzerland

The presentation will act as an introductionary element to the workshop. On one hand providing insights into the latest features which will be released with our forthcoming SEMCAD X Version 14.6 by the beginning of May, on the other hand providing an outlook about subsequent releases and activities in 2011.
In addition, feature and application highlights will be outlined, allowing to solve the most complex antenna design challenges in various industries, including telecommunications, medical implants, health care, automotive, etc.

Three Exposure Systems and Dosimetry for in Vivo Studies on Small Animals

Marcos Alvarez-Folgueiras, Elena Lopez-Martin and Francisco J. Ares-Pena
Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, Spain

The possible effects of RF exposure fields in the airspace above humans have become an issue of increasing importance. Three different experimental RF exposure systems were developed by the Bioelectromagnetics Group at the University of Santiago de Compostela to study in vivo biological effects and dosimetry in small animals. The intent was to simulate daily life, where people are exposed to different radio frequencies at any given time. In the first system, the absorbed power measurement made it possible to calculate whole-body and average brain SAR from the animal's weight. Assuming that local SARs are proportional to whole-body mean SAR, the latter can be used to adjust simulated organ-specific SAR predictions for rats, which were obtained using the SEMCAD X FDTD program with a numerical phantom. In the other systems, the electromagnetic field was calculated by an isotropic probe and the SAR in the animal region of interest was estimated using SEMCAD X with the numerical phantom.


Advances in Accelerated Finite-Difference Time-Domain Methods and Their Applications

Trevor Cameron and Michal Okoniewski
University of Calgary, Canada

The talk will outline features implemented in the Acceleware Finite-Difference Time-Domain engine by the Applied Electromagnetics Group at the University of Calgary. Firstly, a modified formulation of one-dimensional Sine-Cosine periodic boundary conditions are implemented with the aim of extracting the complex wavenumber for leaky-wave structures. Secondly, a novel implementation of the total-field scattered-field is introduced in a controlled-source electromagnetic method environment for the purpose of accelerating large scale simulations. Acceleware's FDTD engine and GPU based acceleration is fully featured within the SEMCAD X simulation environment.


Human Hand and Mobile Phone/Antenna Interaction: A CEM Approach Using SEMCAD X

Chung-Huan Li (1), Mark Douglas (2) and Erdem Ofli (1)
(1) Schmid & Partner Engineering AG, Zurich, Switzerland
(2) ETH Zurich, IT'IS Foundation, Switzerland

The talk introduces a range of studies conducted at the IT'IS Foundation and SPEAG regarding human hand effects on mobile phone systems. The topics cover both antenna performance and safety compliance, such as over-the-air (OTA) performance and specific absorption rate (SAR). The presentation includes interactive parts which illustrate - within the framework of the SEMCAD X platform - how to import and dynamically posture hand models in interaction with industrial mobile phone CAD data. In addition, numerical simulations and obtained results are outlined and discussed.


Implantable Antennas & Body Phantoms

Francesco Merli, Karim Jaber and Anja K. Skrivervik
Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland

One of the main aspects of implanted antennas is, obviously, the presence of the human body. The lossy tissues modify the antenna performances, and they interact with the electromagnetic waves. Simple and complex models can be used to predict these effects. Different phantoms and their simulation in SEMCAD X are discussed in order to identify acceptable solutions depending on the targeted goal.


OpenCL Accelerated FDTD Solvers

Tomasz P. Stefanski and Niels Kuster
ETH Zurich, IT'IS Foundation, Switzerland

Our research focused on implementations of numerical methods within electromagnetics (EM) in modern high performance computing hardware will be presented. The abundance of available computing architectures, i.e., machines based on multi-core CPUs, GPUs and related clusters, motivates development of electromagnetic solvers in the Open Computing Language (OpenCL). This standard facilitates parallel programming of heterogeneous platforms consisting of multi-core CPUs, GPUs, and other modern processors. OpenCL unifies the process of code development for heterogeneous computing systems using one programming environment (compiler) to target substantially different processing elements. Based on this technology, several FDTD solvers were developed, combined with the SEMCAD X simulation platform and executed to solve real-life problems of computational EM and antenna applications in order to demonstrate their performance and applicability.


Biomedical Applications of SEMCAD X: Selected Research from McGill University

Emily Porter and Milica Popovic
McGill University, Canada

The presentation will focus on our group's usage of SEMCAD X for the simulation of microwave breast cancer detection. The issues addressed include: application-specific antenna design, incorporating MRI-derived breast images into SEMCAD X in a computationally effective way, tissue modeling and selected comparison of experimental results on tissue phantoms with the simulation data.


Electromagnetic Dosimetry for Human Provocation Studies and Implantable Antenna Design

Maria Christopoulou, Asimina Kiourti and Konstantina S. Nikita
National Technical University of Athens, Greece

The presentation covers a range of research and application aspects performed using SEMCAD X and is separated in two parts. The first part addresses the uncertainty and variability in EM dosimetry for human provocation studies with EEG and ERP recordings, including EM characterization of selected Talairach regions. The second part has a focus on the design and performance of novel miniature antennas implanted in the human head, for wireless biotelemetry.