Software Solutions for Antenna Design Exploration: A Comparison of Packages, Tools, Techniques and Algorithms for Various Design Challenges

Numerous software packages exist for solving antenna design optimization problems, with many of these employing a variety of approaches, leading, in turn, to variations in optimization performance. Antenna designers, often not fully schooled in optimization, can be confused as to which algorithm in which software package should be used. A wrong choice can cause the failure of the optimization or the expending of considerable time on the computationally expensive 3D electromagnetic (EM) simulations involved. While it is true that the various algorithms, combined with the variety of complex challenges found in different real-world scenarios make a direct comparison among tools difficult, a robust attempt at such an evaluation is overdue.