Program for Designing Multiple-Reflector Antenna Systems

Millimeter-Wave Optics Design Tool (MOD Tool) is a computer program for analyzing and designing multiple-reflector antenna systems that operate at microwave and millimeter wavelengths. MOD Tool is intended for use in conjunction with a computer-aided-design (CAD) program along with other specialized programs that focus, variously, on thermal, mechanical, and other aspects of design. MOD Tool is a distributed client/server application program that includes a data base of design information residing on a server computer, plus software components that perform physical-optics analyses on a variety of supercomputers. The client portion of MOD Tool includes graphical-user-interface software components that reside on a desktop computer. In addition to enabling an antenna designer to obtain computations for analysis and design of antennas, the client portion of MOD Tool serves as a data interface between (1) the antenna design and (2) the CAD and the structural and thermal designs. MOD Tool creates one standard data type for both physical optics and geometric optics and translation mechanisms for each. It can utilize parallel supercomputing to speed time-consuming physical-optics calculations. The graphical user interface relieves the antenna designer of many details, thereby simplifying the designer's task