Adaptive multi-level uniform space partitioning algorithm for high-frequency electromagnetics simulations based on ray tracing

This paper presents a volumetric space partitioning algorithm which can be used for accelerating high-frequency electromagnetic (EM) simulations based on a Shooting-and-Bouncing-Rays (SBR) algorithm. The goal of this algorithm is to minimize the number of ray-surface intersection tests. While the application of space partitioning is rather common in ray tracing EM simulations as well as in computer science, an adaptive multi-level extension of the volumetric space partitioning scheme is proposed here. The multi-level space partitioning algorithm only requires the maximum allowed number of geometric elements inside a volumetric space partition and adaptively creates the space partitioning grid according to the object studied in the simulation, i.e. according to the distribution of geometric elements. The results show that runtimes can easily be reduced by 50% when applying this optimization algorithm.