CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
March 2007
Implementation Investments
Sarantel Selects MicroStripes 3D Electromagnetic Simulation Software in $620,000 R&D Investment
Sarantel Ltd., a leading manufacturer of miniature filtering antennas for mobile and wireless devices, has signed a contract worth $620,000 over three years for multiple licenses of Flomerics ' MicroStripes 3D electromagnetic simulation software.
"MicroStripes is an important tool that has helped Sarantel become a leader in the design of antennas for personal devices such as mobile phones and navigation systems," said Oliver Leisten, Chief Technology Officer for Sarantel. "These extra licenses will further shorten our product development cycle and increase our product performance advantage over competitors."
Sarantel will scale up its use of MicroStripes software to simulate unique dielectrically loaded antennas - a technically very difficult task, according to Leisten.
"MicroStripes' unique octree meshing technology and its ability to simulate frequency-dependent dielectric materials makes it the ideal solution to model the complex detail and high dielectric loading that characterize our antennas," he explained.
Sarantel's GeoHelix GPS antenna helps maintain a slim form factor without compromising GPS accuracy or performance. Sarantel's antenna technology is especially ideal for multi-functional wireless products where a number of radio systems such as GSM, GPS, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth may be operating simultaneously in a tight space.
"It's a very complex challenge to design a high-performing antenna for a personal device because the human body itself acts as a dielectric and interferes with the antenna's performance," said Leisten. "To simulate an antenna which is close to a person's body you need to generate an impulse at time zero and watch it ripple through the model until it achieves a steady state. Normally most of the energy would be dissipated in the person's body which would detract from the performance of the antenna. Our antennas have a dielectric core that conserves energy that would otherwise be wasted.
"We have used MicroStripes to design our entire product line and it has been one of the keys to our success. We have fully automated the antenna design process by creating our own specific software that rapidly explores the design space and iterates to an optimized design.
"Our software launches MicroStripes and uses it to evaluate the antenna performance. We perform an experiment that runs 10 or so iterations simultaneously on a dual-core 64-bit Opteron processor machine. These experiments typically determine the effects of two different variables on antenna performance as well as the interactions between these variables."
Leisten added: "In the thirteen years that I have used MicroStripes, it has consistently shown an unmatched level of accuracy over other EM solutions."
"At the end of a series of experiments, we have typically optimized the antenna design. Then our software generates CAD files of the optimized design. These CAD files are used to drive a laser lithography machine that produces the physical antenna. The high accuracy of MicroStripes means that further design changes are rarely required during the physical prototyping process, accelerating our time-to-market. The new licensing agreement with Flomerics gives us a unique advantage by enabling us to evaluate as many antennas design as we wish simultaneously. This will make it possible to ramp up our product development process by designing more new antennas in less time, keeping us at the cutting-edge of the technology. "
Become a member of the CIMdata PLM Community to receive your daily PLM news and much more.
Tell us what you think of the CIMdata Newsletter. Send your feedback.
CIMdata is committed to your privacy. Your personal information will never be sold or shared outside of CIMdata without your express permission.