Open-Source Software for Electromagnetic Scattering Simulation: The Case of Antenna Design

Electromagnetic scattering simulation is an extremely wide and interesting field, and its continuous evolution is associated with the development of computing resources. Undeniably, antenna design at all levels strongly relies on electromagnetic simulation software. However, despite the large number and the high quality of the available open-source simulation packages, most companies have no doubts about the choice of commercial program suites. At the same time, in the academic world, it is frequent to develop in-house simulation software, even from scratch and without proper knowledge of the existing possibilities. The rationale of the present paper is to review, from a practical viewpoint, the open-source software that can be useful in the antenna design process. To this end, an introductory overview of the usual design workflow is firstly presented. Subsequently, the strengths and weaknesses of open-source software compared to its commercial counterpart are analyzed. After that, the main open-source packages that are currently available online are briefly described. The last part of this paper is devoted to a preliminary numerical benchmark for the assessment of the capabilities and limitations of a subset of the presented open-source programs. The benchmark includes the calculation of some fundamental antenna parameters for four different typologies of radiating elements.