Standardization within the Antenna Software Initiative Guy A. E. Vandenbosch 1 , Raphaël Gillard 2 1 Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Department of Electrical Engineering, Kasteelpark Arenberg 10, 3001 Leuven, Belgium, 32 16 32 11 10 2 IETR, INSA, Avenue des buttes de Coësmes, 35043 Rennes, France, +33 2 23 23 86 61 Abstract — At the writing of this paper, ACE, the European Network of Excellence on antennas, was 18 months old. During those 18 months, the software activity has shown a continuous evolution towards very precise and clear goals. Since we believe that these goals are also of importance to a more general community, in this paper, they are explained to the interested reader. Actually, all goals can be summarized into one word: standardization. The aim of the ASI (the Antenna Software Initiative within ACE), is to standardize the way antenna software researchers implement new modeling ideas. An idea itself can be conceived in complete “academic” freedom, but the implementation of the idea, the handling and use of the resulting software code, could follow European standards, as is already the case in many other fields of science. I. INTRODUCTION ACE is a Network of Excellence (NoE) within the 6 th framework of the European Union (EU). A NoE provides the means to establish integrated European research communities. ACE stands for ‘Antenna Center of Excellence’. Its mission is to deal with the antenna function of radio systems. This includes the electromagnetic interface from conductors to free space radiated waves, the beam-forming functions, whether they are analogue or digital, and adaptive "smart" systems to optimize performance. Detailed information about the ACE network can be found in [1], [2], and on the ACE websites: www.ist-ace.org ., and www.antennasvce.org. One of the efforts being performed within ACE is the Antenna Software Initiative (ASI). The reason for this is the observation that although for a long time already there has been a strong coordination in fundamental antenna modeling problems in Europe, concerning the actual software itself, the European effort is still scattered. Also, there is no real overview anywhere. At the beginning of ACE, nobody knew what software exactly was available in Europe, at universities, research institutes, and in companies. Just after a code has been finished only the people that have developed the software know precisely what their software can do. Also, although these codes often tend to show a higher performance and accuracy for specific antenna types than the commercial codes, in many cases only the authors of the code are using them. There are of course specific examples of cooperation, but there no real cooperation on a European scale at the level of the software itself. The hard consequence of all this is that, from a European economical perspective, the current “return on investment” of the enormous amount of labor intensive work spent to the development of these software codes is extremely low. It is really a bottle neck for European integrated progress in this research field. As reported last year in Amsterdam, in answer to this problem, within the ACE network an inventory was made of the software available among all partners of ACE, describing in detail the possibilities and limitations (capabilities to handle complex structures, environments, feeds, active components,...). A first important step was the conception of a software description template, where, after a discussion between all partners, all the items relevant to this inventory were agreed upon. Already this is a form of standardization. In a second step the software tools were categorized according to the fundamental type of antenna being considered (e.g. planar antennas, reflector antennas, …), according to the numerical modeling technique, and according to the physical structure that can be handled. This was the basis for the further work within the ASI. In the following three sections, three important activities that are currently going on are described. Chronologically, they all started after the inventory phase: 1. benchmarking, 2. the Electromagnetic Data Interface activity, 3. brainstorming towards a Multilevel Multiregion Computation framework. II. BENCHMARKING ACTIVITIES The benchmarking began in June 2004 after the software inventory had been completed. The main objective is to select a first set of antenna structures that will be used for software assessment. Up to 29 different configurations have been considered for selection, which represents a large coverage of technologies and applications. A first benchmarking run started in February 2005. This preliminary experiment is first restricted to ACE participants in order to check the whole procedure before opening it. Five test-cases have been selected for this first run: 1- A genetically optimized patch antenna with unusual shape 2- A multiband patch antenna with vertical metallizations and slot loadings 3- A 4-elements printed sub-array with its feeding network