The Feko Component Library: Creating Parametrized Antenna Models in Seconds

Do you know about the component library in CADFEKO? This continuously growing library contains three types of components:

• Fully parameterized antenna models (for arbitrary frequency bands)
• Antenna configurations for special applications (in special frequency bands)
• Typical platform models for antenna placement analysis

The models are available at the CADFEKO home ribbon. With a filter you can search for different antenna types and select the appropriate model. The component properties will be visualized in a preview window.

Especially the parametric antenna models are very valuable and can be used for several advanced engineering workflows:

• Design of Experiments (DoE)
• Optimization with respect to customized goal functions
• Stochastic analysis
• Data creation for supervised learning to create reduced order models.
• Reverse engineering of industrial antennas when no models are available.

The library contains almost 100 different models. Most relevant antenna types are covered in the library.

Recently new EMC antennas, patch antennas, and 5G base station antennas have been included. New additions to the platform models are 2 new vehicle models, several satellite models and standard RCS test objects.

Just give it a try and discover how complex models can be built in seconds!

Sharing protected Models with third Parties

Sometimes you want to make your own simulation models available to customers, but at the same time you want to protect the know-how contained in the model. A typical example is a radar antenna model used by an automotive OEM for an antenna integration simulation. The radar antenna model comes from a supplier, who can save the Feko antenna model as a protected model (assigning a password to the model). Without password the integrator is not able to open the model, but he can import the protected model - visualized as a black box - and use it adding his own scattering objects for simulation.

The Feko Model Protection has the following options and features:

• When preparing a protected model to share with other Feko users, a "representative geometry" may be prepared to control how the protected model is represented to the consumer of the protected model.
• When a protected model is used in such a way that it is in contact with unprotected geometry, the mesh prepared for the Feko Solver will be correctly adjusted to represent the connectivity.
• Workplanes and Ports defined in a protected model may be "exposed" before protecting the model. This allows consumers to use these exposed definitions for accurate and flexible model alignment and to adjust loads and excitation on exposed ports.
• S-Parameters and near-fields may now be calculated when solving models which include protected components.

To prevent protected properties of the antenna from being reconstructed from the results, the post-processing options are restricted:

• Some requests, most notably currents, will be excluded from the simulation even if the requests are defined. Near fields can be requested and will be calculated, but only the results that fall outside the bounding box of the protected part will be available.
• Some parts of text files (such as the *.pre and *.out file) will be encrypted and will not be editable or readable. The solver will limit details written to the screen as well as output files and certain output files are not supported and if requested, the setting to write out these files will be ignored.

In the Blade antenna example below, the antenna supplier can grant access for the wire port properties to the Integrator, so that he is able to evaluate the impedance behavior of the antenna. Also, the integrator can evaluate far-field and gain patterns, but the near-field evaluation is only possible at some distance from the antenna and the current evaluation on the antenna is completely disabled.

More details of this feature are described in the Feko User Guide in Chapter 2.6 on Model Protection - Feko User Guide 2025.0 PDF.