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By Remcom, Inc.

Remcom currently offers a product for quick prototyping of planar microstrip and stripline beamformers of the Rotman Lens type. This product is called Rotman Lens Designer, or RLD for short. It is based on a combination of theoretical design equations and simple geometrical optics which provides rapid design creation and optimization, but leaves at least a little doubt as to the realistic performance of the lens.

The XFdtd 7.0 product is a full-wave simulator that is based on the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method which has been validated for numerous applications. It is a readily-available option for verifying the performance of the lenses developed by the RLD software.

A typical Rotman Lens device can have tens or hundreds of input ports, which made the problem set-up quite tedious in earlier versions of the XFdtd software. However, with version 7.0, a sophisticated scripting language, based on Qt Script, is available which makes it possible to replace many time-consuming operations with a simple macro. Each macro can be saved and reused again and again.

For the specific case of the interaction between RLD and XFdtd 7.0, a file loading script has already been written and is available for any user of RLD. This script will read the RLD geometry file description (stored with a *.2ds file extension) and import the entire geometry, and add all port definitions required. Manually performing this task in XFdtd 6.0 could take over an hour. With the script functionality, the process is handled by the software with minimal user interaction in less than five minutes.

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•Application Note: Rotman Lens Simulation Using A 3-D Electromagnetic Solver