The Center for Computational Electromagnetics is part of the
ECE department at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It began as the
Antenna Laboratory in the late 1940's. Many important antennas were developed there, among which are the
log-periodic and
log-spiral antenna types.
Over the years the Antenna Laboratory changed its focus from experimental electromagnetics to those of a more computational nature. The Center for Computational EM, now headed by Dr. Weng Cho Chew, is at the forefront in high speed computational algorithms for solving difficult electromagnetic problems. The CCEM has several very active research ares in each of the Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD), Finite Element Method (FEM), and Method of Moments (MoM) techniques. These groups cooperate regularly with the NCSA for testing and running large-scale EM codes on the their Origin 2000 supercomputer system.
The CCEM is notable for its software implementations of highly advanced EM signature techniques. Among these are the Fast Illinois Solver Code (FISC), a triangular surface patch far-field solver which uses the RWG triangular basis functions and the Multi-level Fast Multipole Algorithm (MLFMA) for solving the problem EM scattering from arbitrarily shaped 3D objects using the Method of Moments. Another code, developed in the late 1980's and early 1990's by CCEM emeriti S.W. Lee is Xpatch, which uses Physical Optics (PO) and the Physical Theory of Diffraction (PTD) to solve similar scattering problems. Xpatch is used by many military organizations to calculate the radar cross section of highly complex target models.
The CCEM is located on the fourth floor of Everitt Laboratory, at the corner of Wright Avenue and Green Street. The pair of large antenna dishes on its roof can't be missed.