The effect of a conductive sheet placed over a PCB with a microstrip line on electromagnetic noise shielding is investigated. As a typical conductive sheet, a copper sheet is used, and is not grounded. First, the input impedance of the microstrip line and the magnetic field when varying the distance between the PCB and the conductive sheet are measured, and the distance that does not affect the signal transmission is set at 8 mm. Second, the effect of the conductive sheet size on the magnetic field radiation is discussed by measurements and FDTD modeling, and the magnetic near-field distribution around the PCB is visualized by using the FDTD calculation. A conductive sheet whose width is larger than the PCB width should be effective for suppression of the magnetic near-field noise radiation just above a PCB.

In this paper, the power plane resonance problem in a multi-layered PCB is numerically analyzed by applying the alternating-direction implicit (ADI) FDTD method. This method is extremely suitable for analyzing the power plane resonance problems having locally fine structures of two closely located planes. This paper also analyzes the effect of the decoupling capacitor, which is one of the solutions for reducing the resonance problem. The results of the ADI-FDTD agree well with those of the conventional FDTD and the analytic solutions, and the computational CPU time is reduced to about a half of that of the conventional FDTD.

A four-pole quasi-elliptic function bandpass filter is designed and fabricated using a miniaturized microstrip square Stepped Impedance Resonator (SIR). The Nonuniform Finite Difference Time Domain (NUFDTD) method is used to design the resonator and to calculate the coupling coefficients of three basic structures. Theoretical and experimental results are presented. This filter is not only compact size but also has a wide upper stop band.

In the FDTD simulation of microwave circuits, a device in very small size compared with the wavelength is often handled as a lumped element, but it may still occupy more than one cell instead of a wire structure without volume routinely employed in classical extended FDTD algorithms. In this paper, two modified extended FDTD algorithms incorporating a lumped element occupying more than one cell are developed directly from the integral form of Maxwell's equations based on the assumption whether displacement current exists inside the region where a device is present. If the displacement current exists, the modified extended FDTD algorithm can be represented as a Norton equivalent current-source circuit, or otherwise as a Thevenin equivalent voltage-source circuit. These algorithms are applied in the microwave line loaded by a lumped resistor and an active antenna to illustrated the efficiency and difference of the two algorithms.

Using the finite-difference time-domain method, we evaluated the performance of apertured near-field fiber probes with a double-tapered structure, which have exhibited, in recent experiments, a much higher collection efficiency of localized light in comparison with single-tapered probes. We clarified that this high collection efficiency could be attributed to the shortening of the cutoff region, and the efficient coupling to the guiding mode of the optical fiber. By reproducing the experimental results in terms of the spatial resolution and the collection efficiency as a function of the aperture diameter, our calculation was confirmed to be valid and useful for the design of probes in a variety of applications.

This paper proposes a novel method to correct numerical phase velocity errors in FDTD meshes with nonuniform step size. It enables the complete compensation of the phase velocity errors introduced by the mesh grading for one frequency and one arbitrary direction of propagation independently of the mesh grading. This permits the usage of the Total-Field-Scattered-Field formulation in connection with electrically large nonuniform FDTD meshes and allows a general reduction of the grid dispersion errors. The capabilities of the proposed method are demonstrated with the help of two examples: (1) the fields in a dielectric sphere illuminated by a plane wave are calculated and (2) a patch antenna simulation demonstrates that the uncertainty in determining its resonance frequency can be reduced by about 50%.

We calculated linear and nonlinear responses of a Kerr nonlinear microsphere sandwiched by two prisms using the excitation of whispering gallery modes due to near-field coupling. As numerical calculations, the finite-difference time-domain method that takes into account the Kerr nonlinear effect was used. We dealt with two types of spheres, i.e., the Kerr-material sphere and the dielectric sphere coated by the Kerr material. It was found that the optical switching phenomena are induced in such spheres. The switching results from the fact that the variations of the refractive index of the nonlinear spheres affect the excitation condition of the whispering gallery modes.

In this paper, we study a low profile top loaded monopole antenna. By changing the number, thickness, position and shape of post(s), the input and radiation characteristic due to parameters of matching post(s) are investigated. The low profile top loaded monopole antenna (TLMA) is known as a suitable way for antenna's miniaturization. But it is also reported that the parameters of matching post influence the input and radiation characteristic greatly. The FDTD method is well suit for use in analyzing both the plate and wire structure. And to improve the calculation effect efficiency, the non-uniform mesh FDTD algorithm is used. From the measurement and simulation results, we propose the most suitable parameters of matching structure for low profile top loaded monopole antenna.

Leakage loss of Conductor Backed Coplanar Waveguide (CBCPW) with air-gap-spacing (AGS) dielectric sheets has been analyzed by using the hybrid 2D-FDTD Method and curve-fitting procedure. From numerical results, the proposed CBCPW with AGS dielectric sheets shows even lower leakage loss characteristics than those of conventional and double-layered one over a wide range of operating frequency. Furthermore, the possibility of the optimum air-gap width for leakage loss has been confirmed.

This paper presents the full wave analysis of a microwave amplifier by the extended finite difference time domain method. The device-wave interaction is characterized and incorporated into the FDTD time-marching scheme. The equivalent current source is used to model the amplifier and all the electric field components at the active sheet are updated by FDTD. Central-difference approximation is used to discretize a set of state equations. The results obtained by the present method show good agreement with those of the frequency domain circuit analysis and serenade v8.5.

We theoretically and experimentally demonstrate low loss branches in a Si photonic wire waveguide. Approximate calculation by the two-dimensional finite-difference time-domain (2-D FDTD) method and detailed design by the 3-D FDTD method indicate that low excess loss less than 0.2 dB is expected for a µm-size bend-waveguide-type branch at a wavelength of 1.55 µm. This branch is fabricated in a silicon-on-insulator substrate and the loss is evaluated to be 0.3 dB. This value is small enough to construct a very compact branching circuit.

In this paper, characteristics of a digital system dedicated to the fast execution of the FDTD algorithm, widely used for electromagnetic simulation, are presented. Such system is conceived as a module communicating with a host personal computer via a PCI bus, and is based on a VLSI ASIC, which implements the "field-update" engine. The system structure is defined by means of a hardware description language, allowing to keep high-level system specification independent of the actual fabrication technology. A virtual implementation of the system has been carried out, by mapping such description in a standard-cell style on a commercial 0.35 µm technology. Simulations show that significant speed-up can be achieved, with respect to state-of-the-art software implementations of the same algorithm.

Scaled models for an anatomical head model and a simple head model are used to investigate the effects of head size on SAR characteristics for a cellular phone exposure at 835 MHz. From the results, we can see that a larger head produces a higher localized SAR and a lower whole-head averaged SAR.

The FDTD method needs Fourier analysis to obtain the fields of a single frequency. Furthermore, the frequency spectra of the fields used in the FDTD method ordinarily have wide bands, and all the fields in FDTD are treated as real numbers. Therefore, if the permittivity ε and the permeability µ of the medium depend on frequency, or if the surface impedance used for the surface impedance boundary condition (SIBC) depends on the frequency, the FDTD method becomes very complicated because of convolution integral. In the electromagnetic theory, we usually assume that the fields oscillate sinusoidally, and that the fields and ε and µ are complex numbers. The benefit of introduction of the complex numbers is very extensive. As we do in the usual electromagnetic theory, the authors assume that the fields in FDTD oscillate sinusoidally. In the proposed FDTD, the fields, ε, µ and the surface impedances for SIBC are all treated as the complex numbers. The proposed FDTD method can remove the above-mentioned weak points of the conventional FDTD method.

Although all-optical gate switches based on the intersubband absorption in nitride quantum wells are predicted to operate at 1 Tb/s, realization of strong intersubband absorption at the optical communication wavelength is still difficult. An alternative approach is an interferometer-type gate switch utilizing refractive index change due to the intersubband absorption of a control pulse at a longer wavelength. Feasibility of Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) gate switches, in which 1.55-µm pulses are controlled by 1.85-µm pulses, was theoretically investigated by finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) simulator. Although the effective phase shift does not reach π, 22.5% of the signal pulse energy was predicted to be gated by a 10-pJ control pulse in the MZI switch. Even 1.3-µm pulses can be controlled by 1.85-µm pulses at the expense of the switching energy. This approach provides a way to process signal pulses at the optical communication wavelength utilizing strong intersubband absorption at a longer wavelength.

Improvement of the absorbing boundary conditions for triangle-hexagonal dual cell grids in the time domain method is described in this paper. The magnetic field components, which are evaluated by the electric fields at the circumcenters of the triangle cells, are conformed to Berenger's perfectly matched layer absorbing boundary conditions. The electric field is linearly interpolated by the fields at the vertices. The lower reflection coefficients in the frequency range for the equilateral and non-equilateral triangle cells are demonstrated.

A novel inverse scattering approach is developed to the reconstruction of electrical property distributions of a two-dimensional biaxial anisotropic object using time-domain scattering data. The approach is an extension of the forward-backward time-stepping (FBTS) algorithm previously described for an isotropic object. Synthetic examples of inversion are given to assess the effectiveness of the proposed method.

A dual-offset microstrip-fed slot antenna having large bandwidth studied in this paper. The proposed antenna is analyzed by the Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) method. In this case, two offsets and other design parameters of the antenna lead to the good impedance matching over a wide frequency band. The experimental bandwidth is approximately 1.587 octave (-10 dB S11). And the experimented data for the impedance loci, the radiation patterns, and gain of the antenna are also described. The measured results are relatively in good agreement with the FDTD results.

A multi-grid finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method was applied for numerical dosimetry analysis in the human head for 5 GHz band portable terminals. By applying fine FDTD grids to the volumes in the human head where the highest electromagnetic (EM) absorption occurs and coarse grids to the remaining volumes of the head, the spatial peak specific absorption rate (SAR) assessment was achieved with a less computation memory and time. The accuracy of applying the multi-grid FDTD method to the spatial peak SAR assessment was checked in comparison with the results obtained from the usual uniform-grid method, and then the spatial peak SARs for three typical situations of a person using a 5.2 GHz band portable terminal were calculated in conjunction with an anatomically based human head model.

This paper describes an electromagnetically coupled microstrip divider that provides high output port isolation and DC cutting. The device consists of a parasitic resonator placed above microstrip patch resonators, achieving tight coupling for both input and output ports. FDTD simulation and measurements reveal that the device has a high isolation between output ports. Equal and unequal 2-way and 3-way power dividers are presented in this paper.