Introduction

This document is intended as supplementary material to HFSS users. We assume you have some experience of designing projects using HFSS. The document includes instructions to create, solve, and analyze results of models that are excited with Floquet ports.

This chapter contains the following topics:

• General Outline
• Floquet Ports in HFSS

General Outline

For the projects described in this guide, you will perform the following tasks in HFSS:

• Create the geometric models.
• Modify the models’ design parameters.
• Specify solution setup and sweep for the designs.
• Validate the design setups.
• Run HFSS simulations.
• Create 2D x-y plots of S-parameter results.

Floquet Ports in HFSS

The Floquet port in HFSS is used exclusively with planar-periodic structures. Chief examples are planar phased arrays and frequency selective surfaces when these may be idealized as infinitely large. The analysis of the infinite structure is then accomplished by analyzing a unit cell. Linked boundaries most often form the side walls of a unit cell, but in addition, a boundary condition is required to account for the infinite space above. The Floquet port is designed for this purpose.

The Floquet port is closely related to a Wave port in that a set of modes (“Floquet modes”) represents the fields on the port boundary. Fundamentally, Floquet modes are plane waves with propagation direction set by the frequency, phasing, and geometry of the periodic structure. Just like Wave modes, Floquet modes too have propagation constants and experience cut-off at low frequency.

When a Floquet port is present, the HFSS solution includes a modal decomposition that gives additional information on the performance of the radiating structure. As in the case of a Wave port, this information is cast in the form of an S-matrix interrelating the Floquet modes. In fact, if Floquet ports and Wave ports are simultaneously present, the S-matrix will interrelate all Wave modes and all Floquet modes in the project.

For the current version, the following restrictions apply:

• Currently, only modal projects may contain Floquet ports.
• Boundaries that are adjacent to a Floquet port must be linked boundaries.
• Fast frequency sweep is not supported. (Discrete and interpolating sweep are supported.)