Topic outline

  • Welcome to the Electromagnetic and Circuit Simulations course!

    Welcome to the Electromagnetic and Circuit simulation course! The course starts with the circuit simulation (AWR) part, and continues with two Electromagnetic simulation parts (COMSOL and CST).

    Course outline:

    The main goal of this course is for students to get hands-on experience with three software packages relevant for Microwave Engineering. During contact session students mainly solve homework exercises with support from the teachers. There will also be short introductions to the numerical methods, as well as demos with practical hints related to each software. All three software packages should be available at least in the PC class in Maarintie 8 (room 1621) and in Maarintalo (but not all in every Windows class).

    This course is divided into three parts:

    1. Circuit simulations using NI AWR Design Environment (Jan 9 - Jan 18),
    2. EM simulations using COMSOL Multiphysics (Jan 23 - Feb 1),
    3. EM simulations using CST Studio Suite (Feb 6 - Feb 15).
    Each part contains two weeks of contact sessions: Tuesdays and Thursdays at 12:15–16:00, i.e. 2 x 4 h/week.

    Workload:

    5 ECTS is nominally about 132 h = 22 h/week during 6 weeks (i.e. one period only). This means up to 14 h of independent work in addition to the scheduled 8 h of contact sessions each week.

    Homework deadlines:
    • The deadline for submitting the exercise solutions is the beginning of the next session (soft deadline)
    • The hard deadline is 2 weeks after the contact session in which the exercises were started
    • There is a linearly increasing penalty for missing the soft deadline, so that at the hard deadline at most 50% of the maximum points can be obtained for an exercise
    • No submissions are allowed after the hard deadline

    Assessment:
    • There is no final exam
    • Assessment is done through the homework exercises described above
    • For circuit simulation part (1/3 of the course), you can get 1/3 of the total maximum score
    • For EM simulation part (2/3 of the course), you can get 2/3 of the total maximum score. Both COMSOL and CST parts give 1/3 of the total score.
    • 45% of the total score is sufficient to pass the course, with 10% steps to the next higher grades