Characteristic mode analysis of arbitrary electromagnetic structures using FEKO

This paper considers the characteristic mode analysis (CMA) of arbitrary electromagnetic structures using the comprehensive 3D electromagnetic field solver, FEKO [1]. The theory of characteristic modes, as presented in [2], is used to derive the real orthogonal current modes. These modes are obtained by solving a generalised symmetric eigenvalue problem defined by the real and imaginary parts of the Method-of-Moments (MoM) impedance matrix. The research presented in this article discusses the techniques used in FEKO to solve this generalised eigenproblem. Furthermore, paralleli-sation using both distributed and shared memory programming models, as well as GPU computation is considered within the FEKO framework to accelerate the CMA.