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Aether Wire & Location, Inc. has pioneered the development of ultra-wideband (UWB) technology capable of identifying the position of many devices to centimeter accuracy over kilometer distances. This technology is applicable to many military and commercial applications ranging from tracking the position of soldiers on the battlefield to inventory control in a factory. As a pioneer in UWB technology, Aether Wire faced the challenge of developing antennas that preserve the original waveform over a wide frequency range while avoiding coverage gaps. The company's engineers discovered that finite difference time domain (FDTD) electromagnetic simulation software provides the ability to simulate antenna performance to a high degree of accuracy while providing reasonable computational times. "FDTD simulation helps us evaluate a wide range of antenna designs, making it possible to optimize antenna performance which in turn was crucial to the success of our UWB technology," said Bob Fleming, Chairman and Co-Founder of Aether Wire, Sunnyvale, California. "Over time we have gained a solid understanding of the factors that affect UWB antenna performance while saving a huge amount of time and money that would have otherwise had to be spent building and testing prototypes." Aether Wire use the XFDTD software package to carry out these calculations.

Over a decade ago, well before the name UWB had even been coined, Aether Wire set out to develop small, low-power transceivers that can be used for position location and low data-rate communications. Global positioning system (GPS) technology was in its infancy then but it was already clear that GPS was not the solution to this problem because it isn't accurate enough and because it cannot operate within buildings, urban areas, forests, etc. For most applications, what is desired is location relative to other people or objects. Aether's technology uses small, low-power transceivers that determine position by cooperatively exchanging an electromagnetic signal. The accuracy of this range determination is proportional to the relative bandwidth, the ratio of the signal frequency to the carrier frequency. With conventional sinewave technology, relative bandwidth is very small, at most a few percent using spread spectrum. The zero-carrier, spread spectrum technology pioneered by Aether Wire, on the other hand, provides a relative bandwidth approaching 100%.

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•Feature Article: Overcoming UWB Antenna Design Challenges With FDTD Software