Release Notes: Altair Feko 2019.1

Altair Feko 2019.1 is available with new features, corrections and improvements. It can be applied as an upgrade to an existing 2019 installation, or it can be installed without first installing Altair Feko 2019.

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.

Feko 2019.1 Release Notes

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

CADFEKO

Resolved Issues

  • Corrected the workplane handling of far field requests calculated in the plane wave incident direction to use the workplane settings from the associated plane wave source.
  • Fixed a display issue with plane wave sources. A plane wave source defined to be looped over multiple directions, but defined with a single angle, was not displayed in the 3D view. Such a source is now rendered like its Single incident wave equivalent.
  • Improved the robustness of the Repair edges tool.
  • Updated the geometry exporter to Gerber format to use commands from the current Extended Gerber (RS-274X) specification. Deprecated commands are discontinued.
  • Resolved an issue with PCB imports (Gerber and ODB++ files) that caused the imported geometry to be scaled by the model extents setting.
  • Updated the parameter sweep script to support UNC paths for model files located on a network drive.

POSTFEKO

Feature

  • Extended the POSTFEKO API with the GetDataSet method for FarFieldPowerIntegrals and FarFieldPowerIntegralStoredData objects.

Resolved Issues

  • Fixed a regression introduced in POSTFEKO 2019.0.1 that could cause the result palette to remain active after creating a new project. Interacting with the trace (from the previous project) could cause the application to crash.
  • Fixed an issue where legend scaling was not applied correctly when the legends were set to use Scale only to selected frequency. The legend range sometimes changed instead of remaining constant over frequency.
  • Added validation to prevent calculating the inverse of a matrix containing invalid (NaN) values, which caused the application to close with a critical error. Running a script that calls the Inverse function on an invalid Matrix object will end in the error “Matrix inverse calculation failed.”

Solver

Resolved Issues

  • Improved the robustness of the ACA solution by improving the detection of linearly independent rows. This results in accuracy improvements without affecting performance.
  • Fixed a numerical tolerance bug that led to incorrect S-parameter results for some models with a specific frequency sampling rate in a narrow band.
  • Fixed a bug in the initialisation of the iterative solution of a decoupled FEM/MLFMM model. The fix enhances the accuracy of the iterative solution to match results given by a direct decoupled FEM/MoM solution.
  • Improved the accuracy of the calculated per-unit length inductance/capacitance of cables, by refining the local mesh settings of a cable cross section.
  • Parallel ordering is no longer activated by default, based on problem size, for MLFMM problems solved with a sparse LU preconditioner.
  • Fixed a bug when calculating the percentage progress during the “Precomputation of far field coefficients” phase of the solution of a model with impressed sources. A percentage progress larger than 100% was previously displayed during this phase.
  • Fixed a bug that prevented the use of radiating cable sources (CableMod/CRIPTE excitation) in a model solved with RL-GO.

Shared Interface Changes

Feature

  • Added an option to the Rendering options dialog in CADFEKO and POSTFEKO to change the graphics driver. This option may provide a solution or workaround when experiencing graphics card problems.

Resolved Issues

  • Resolved an issue with the keytips not being populated properly on the ribbon for the various GUI applications.
  • Improved form dialog destruct behaviour. Hovering over the script editor in the Windows 10 taskbar (when the Windows system performance setting “Enable peek” is active) now only shows the dialogs from the script that was last executed. Before, the form dialogs from multiple scripts would be stacked in the preview.

WinProp 2019.1 Release Notes

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

ProMan

Features

  • For automotive radar applications, when radar cross section (RCS) information from Feko is used, this information is dynamically adjusted to account for the actual finite distance to the object.
  • Added support for converting multiple topography tiles, given in the ASCII grid format, in one run. This is available through the ASCII grid format index file (*.txt) option in the topography conversion dialog box.
  • The offset of receiver antenna elements is now considered in the delay calculations of subchannel and stream results.

Resolved Issues

  • Attenuation due to atmospheric conditions was incorrectly considered for indoor and urban scenarios, and it was ignored for various propagation models in the rural scenario. This is fixed.
  • Fixed a bug that resulted in wrong entries of the transmission matrix and the ex_v, ey_v, ez_v and ex_h, ey_h, ez_h values in case of non full polarimetric projects. In case of vertical polarisation at the transmitter the horizontal components of the transmission matrix were equal to zero. Non-zero entries are now computed for all polarisations.
  • Fixed a bug that could cause the received power to be incorrect for a receiving antenna that was tilted close to 90 degrees up or down.
  • Fixed a bug that resulted in the sub-channel power results written to ASCII files, during post-processing, being identical for multiple antenna elements at the receiver.
  • Fixed a bug that resulted in a region of a rural database not being computed when an antenna pattern with a 0.25 degree resolution is used.
  • Added support for patterns with sub one degree resolution at the mobile station.
  • Fixed a bug that resulted in some of the network planning results along trajectory not being computed.
  • Adjusted allowed tolerances to allow for network planning to be carried out with very fine resolutions.

WallMan

Resolved Issues

  • Fixed a bug that resulted in visibility information from diffraction wedges not being included in an indoor database that is preprocessed for IRT.
  • A check for a defined polygon has been added prior to preprocessing a database when the area of preprocessing is chosen to be based on a user defined polygon. An explicit error message is now issued prior to preprocessing in case there is no predefined polygon.
  • Significantly reduced the time taken for database preprocessing for Urban IRT. A speed-up factor of ~2x can be obtained.