FAST ANTENNA CHARACTERIZATION USING THE SOURCES RECONSTRUCTION METHOD ON GRAPHICS PROCESSORS

The Sources Reconstruction Method (SRM) is a non-invasive technique for, among other applications, antenna characterization. The SRM is based on obtaining a distribution of equivalent currents that radiate the same field as the antenna under test. The computation of these currents requires solving a linear system, usually ill-posed, that may be very computationally demanding for commercial antennas. Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are an interesting hardware choice for solving compute-bound problems that are prone to parallelism. In this paper, we present an implementation on GPUs of the SRM applied to antenna characterization that is based on a compute-bound algorithm with a high degree of parallelism. The GPU implementation introduced in this work provides a dramatic reduction on the time cost compared to our CPU implementation and, in addition, keeps the low-memory footprint of the latter. For the sake of illustration, the equivalent currents are obtained on a base station antenna array and a helix antenna working at practical frequencies. Quasi real-time results are obtained on a desktop workstation.